I have a client trying to tell me how to do my job. It’s very evident that he doesn’t understand how to do my job, but he thinks he does, and I’m not really sure how to reply to his email without insulting him.
The problem we’re facing is due to him (and his team) not recognizing the impacts of something, and now that I’m looking to approve it, they’re upset because I’m asking for documentation that they didn’t think they had to provide. Their argument amounts to trust me, bro, it’s compliant.
In order to avoid a repeat of the Marshall fire, that burned several suburban neighborhoods near Boulder, Colorado, Xcel is turning off power in areas in anticipation of 70 MPH wind gusts. No problem, I get it.
1pm yesterday: all of campus will lose power at 10am tomorrow (which is now today)
6pm yesterday: snow day tomorrow! (because “wind day” sounds stupid)
7:30am today: all of campus will lose power at 10am today
9:30am today: all of campus will lose power at 10am today
9:45am today: I turn off all computer servers
10:02am today: power will remain on for all of campus (except a few buildings)
Oh well, we officially get a snow day (even though it’s 60+F outside), so the computers being off isn’t a big deal, unless one of them doesn’t turn back on, but that will be a tonight’s me problem.
My building has a large generator to keep freezers and labs running during a power outage. The building next door, which is also part of my department, does not have a generator. It does have several -80C freezers. Facilities management is currently onsite running cables from the generator to the freezers. Perhaps after this they will come up with a proper emergency plan.
Nobody is sure how the building should be accessed if the card readers lose power. It’s possible the card readers have batteries, but they’re old enough that nobody knows. Some people think the card readers might fail open, but nobody is sure. My real guess is that someone knows, but nobody involved at the moment knows who that person is.
Our new guest wifi network requires that you enter a code from an email in order to access it. So you need to be online to get online. This is by design, and will not change.
I teach at two universities. At one, 2FA works like this: click the login link; enter your credentials (or if your credentials are saved on your computer, click “login”); enter the code that pops up in the app on your phone. Done. Want to log in to another service? You’re already in (for however long the time-out period is). Already logged in to University WiFi? No need for 2FA at all.
The other? Go to the main login page. Click the login button. Enter your username. Click enter. Enter your password. Why are these two separate screens? Nobody knows. Click login. Get push notification. Confirm it’s you. Perform secondary identification (in my case fingerprint). Congratulations, you’re logged in to the main dashboard! Want to open your faculty management page? Do it all again! Want to open Canvas? Do it all again! Want to open Workday? Do it all again! Want to open your email? Do it all again! Oh, you were logged in to email from a previous session? Sorry, we have to log you out first. Now do it all again! Already logged in to University WiFi? Fuck you.
I wonder if the latter, the one with the repetitive logins is for a larger/smaller university or perhaps the security department head is just a tightly-rusted lug nut.
One Uni probably has fully integrated systems. The other Uni buys a grab-bag of silo-ed apps from various vendors for the various functions of running a university. And doesn’t bother to set up a central SSO to make all the grab bag items work together easily.
Heck, there may be enough variation between which authentication systems the various grab bag apps support that there is no way to get to “single” sign-on. There is small value in consistency in have each app doing its own sign-on versus e.g. sorta SSO over here gets you into these 3 apps, and sorta SSO over there gets you into this other set of 5 apps, and oh yeah, these other 4 apps each need separate sign-ons just for themselves.
I have actually experienced this before, but what happens is that they allow access to the internet for a limited amount of time for you to get the email on your device and confirm. It works well enough, though I am guessing that is not the case at your work?
Nope, it is a full registration for a new account and then password setup type system.
From the portal page put in your email address. You will get a randomly generated user id and password. Login with that and go through a forced password change (because there’s no guarantee the emailed password was transmitted securely). The account stays active for 7 days, then you’ll have to do it all over again.
The old guest wifi system was the “click accept” type.
I’m sympathetic to the security concerns of the old system. This is a public university, so anyone can come on campus and use the wifi from outdoors, or inside an open building. At least now an email address will be tied to any particular MAC address that accesses the wifi.
I have no idea how much of a problem there was with bad behavior originating from the guest wifi, though, and I’m skeptical that require an email address will diminish it.
The complaint I’ve heard so far is people starting the process, then having to go outside where they can get a mobile signal to check their email, then going back inside where they can get on the wifi to finish setup.
That sounds vastly like a theoretical fear in search of a problem leading to an overkill solution.
IOW…
What if we has a mass shooter event and it emerged that they were on our wifi and we didn’t have their email? We’d look bad. Time for a total overhaul of our guest access. Just in case.
Oh, it turns out their address is bad-guy-6969@proton.me and they created that address a minute before getting on the WiFi, and there’s no way to even trace it to a burner phone?
Based on Teams chatter, I think the “problem” they’re fighting is students and employees using the guest wifi repeatedly without ever registering the device. It was always easy to use the official WiFi, just login with your id once a year. Taping “accept” every day is pretty easy, too though, so they stepped up the annoyance factor. And I bet if you try to register with your university email, it yells at you.
I can understand the difficulty, as a university is employer, landlord, police department, and in loco parantis. I’m not sure this is going to even be an effective solution to the problem they think they have, but it is a thing, and they did it.
If the concern is employees & students using the guest wifi then the meta question is why that’s a problem, besides offending some rigid anal retentive notions of “insiders” and “outsiders” who must never mix.
One easy way to solve the problem is seriously throttle the guest wi-fi. Once it’s slow, but the in-house is fast, people will do the thing you want them to. Or firewall most of the services students and employees need so they simply can’t be accessed from the guest network. And firewall all the major media sites, streaming services, etc.
Ahh, the things I don’t miss about herding the cats.
Donuts? No, no, we’ve got Gluten Free scones (okay, Dwight, “Allegedly-Gluten Free” for legal reasons). And since Muriel from Accounts Receivable would derail the meeting with a lecture about the evils of sugar, they’ll be unfrosted, and we’ll have a ramekin of fig jam on the side instead.
I don’t know what to do about colleagues and government agencies who cannot or will not read and think for themselves. When two things are DIFFERENT they are therefore NOT THE SAME and so the requirements for both cannot be the same. I don’t know how to beat this into their skulls and I’m facing a project delay because of these lazy illiterate assholes.
I spoon fed this to them. Gave them every reference, every guidance document, and they couldn’t even transcribe the fucking titles correctly. They’re trying to use regulations for something else entirely when regulations for the thing I’m doing actually exists.
A bicycle is not a train. Sure there’s overlapping concepts, but don’t fucking ask me to certify a bicycle to the standards applicable to trains and certainly not after I pretty much wrote out everything you needed for you and could could just copy paste.
Idiots.
(No, this project is neither about bicycles nor trains and I’m exaggerating out of frustration, but the discrepancy is that sort of thing).
I requested and was approved for the week of Dec 22 and Dec 29th off. I was looking forward to it. Around the 12th, I was put on a high profile/priority client to help with it. Around the 16th, they asked me not to take two weeks off. They were fine with the 22nd, the office would be closed for the 24th and 25th, but wondered if I would work a normal week on the 29th. It’s an ESOP company, I liked them, and I was trying for a promotion, so I agreed. I was not happy about it and it became obvious I needed the vacation because I was not happy. I got over it.
The high profile client continued so much that my work load from my standard group was removed from me and given to my two teammates who are also QAs. I had a few that were related to the client on that team but everything else was off loaded.
Then they laid me off today.
Well, fuck. I like the company, my co-workers, and what I was doing and now I have to look for a job, which I hate doing.
Information keeps coming to me about the lay offs.
They laid off “ten plus one manager” is what I’m told. I’m not sure why they phrase it as if a manager isn’t people. One of the people laid off had twenty years with the company. I was at three and a half. That’s about one percent of the company. We had just reached one thousand employees, which we had celebrated at our summit in October. Sure, a targeted one percent can help a division or a group but I’m not sure about a company. I don’t know that for sure as I don’t understand accounting.
They based the lay offs on our utilization numbers, or billable hours. I was on Dev Support. We only have the hours based on the stories they give us. Nothing under our control. Further, it was always going to be me based on utilization because while I did my share of Dev Support, I also stepped up to help with the network monitoring software, AppD, which we also used for our uptime reporting for the SLA we have with clients. All important stuff, non of it billable.
After doing AppD work for eighteen months, and not feeling like I was appreciated, I stepped back from it. I was given the task of automation, since it is known Dev Support has feast and famine times. I took to that and really enjoyed it. I got several clients started and showed my fellow QAs how to run tests for a client that they knew well. This was all being done to show I was adding overall value to the company and show I was ready for a promotion. Yep, not billable.
What made me salty about it was this information. They have known about this for a month. That means that even before they gave me the high profile client, they knew at some point, I would be gone. I felt like I was being noticed, I was asked for it, and it meant nothing. On the day I was laid off, we had a 7 am meeting for the client. The team is in Singapore because few meetings happen before nine am. My manager’s manager was in that meeting as was her manager. They gave no indication that anything would happen. Now, they were ordered not to, I get it. I can’t ask them to risk their jobs. I only bring it up because it further added to the way I was completely caught off guard when the lay off happened. This client needed a lot of testing and I was one of the few doing it because the BAs were busy with other clients but that didn’t matter.
Of course, people are now asking questions about being billable. There were definite hints dropped that only by being billable is their job guaranteed. As with me, most of the time, that’s not under someone’s control. Let’s say I hadn’t been laid off. That news would probably make me anxious daily and miserable in the long term. It might have pushed me to leave on its own.
That sounds so much like the last private sector* place I worked for seven years. I remember my last review where I showed the Big Bosses how much I was doing, including coming in early and staying late (I’d just put in over 80 hours the week prior).
I was interrupted with “Well, you claim you’re here from dawn til midnight, but we just don’t see it…” (That’s right, because you’re the owner, so you waltz in at 10am in your tennis whites, eating an ice cream cone!)
.
*I say “private sector” because I realized I’d never get to know my preschoolers, or be rewarded for my loyalty to the company. So I jumped ship to the academic world…
… where the Dean never critiqued my teaching, my classroom hours totaled 24-30/week, and the grading and lesson planning could work around my family’s schedules.