This brings back memories. They weren’t GOOD memories either. Every time I think about how things suck as an infrastructure engineer I think I’m going to pull up this thread to remind me how much worse it sucked when I used to be a DBA and programmer analyst.
To the OP…as Three Dog says, keep fighting the good fight. Don’t let those evil bastards get you down. And one final thought…better you than me!
-XT
I was there just a little later. I started Sep92 and finished Apr93 and started my first programming job the following Monday. I aced the course which was very odd for me as I was actually a bad student in HS & College.
I found it, Received Software Engineer Award for graduating first in class GPA 100%. Usually I did enough to get by, but then I quit a decent job in the middle of a recession to go to Cittone to switch careers and actually ended up with a pay cut for the first 6 months in Programming compared to my HVAC job. I got lucky though, my job was right in Middlesex and not NYC or Rochester.
Whaddaya mean “if?” 
We just switched over to SAP. One module at a time starting with Finance. The 18 month transition period was like one long root canal operation.
Paper PO’s were phased out last summer. Three days of training to enter PO’s under the new system. Three days. So far I have successfully avoided it but I live in dread.
Not to defend SAP, but in fairness most major ERP transitions are like one long root canal operation. 18 months is not really abnormal. Though the projects I have been on in the past were never more than 9 months and usually closer to 6 months.
The ERP I work on is a royal pain to upgrade to the next version if you need to apply any changes from past versions. Some of the code is basically RPG II from the 80s forces to work in RPGLE. I have a lot of vanilla code with goto tag loops. :mad:
At least the custom code in my shop has been nearly completely modernized and made far more efficient.
I once received an e-mail request from a user for “All the numbers on the XXX process” My reply was:
Sure! 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 oh and don’t forget 0. That’s all the numbers I’ve got.
Followed two minutes later by:
Seriously I’ve got hundreds of gigs of data on that, do you want a dump truck full of paper, or would you like me to tie up the network for a couple of hours sending it to you?
What did she do wrong here?
She wanted a password reset after not having logged on after a year. The account is most likely locked out, and a password reset doesn’t do much for that.
Or possibly expired, depending on the system and the company’s security policy.
We auto-expire IDs for one of our billing systems after 90 days of inactivity. If you want in after that, you need to go through the whole application process all over again, complete with the necessary sign-offs from your manager (and occasionally a director or two, if you need access to some of the more sensitive functions).
Most of the time, you can’t even put a rush on those requests because no one has sympathy for someone who didn’t bother logging into the system for three months and only just realised that they have a deep burning desire to get back in NOW. Sit back and wait a week. Sucker.
An irrational preferential bias on my part I suppose (MVS all the way baby). And a horrible experience supporting them for about a year doing first level, command center type stuff. Actually more like 30 of them, scattered across the globe. Several in which I had to deal with non-english speaking support and users via Altavista babelfish translator. Issues like printers (fuck those printers and the users that used them), backups (fuck them too, horrible hardware issues with the ATL we had, IBM was hit or miss for getting the required support we needed), task availability (tasks would need to be recycled all the time for seamingly no reason).
A lot of the issues involved Sev 1 tickets and crisis lines for small potatoes shit. On-call systems support were literally condescending assholes (solved plenty of AS/400 issues from Google and AS/400 forums than from a Sr Admin making a 100k salary). The worst and most stressful year of my working life. It felt like you had to hold the hand of every single AS/400 we had, and that’s on top of the automation in place. Admittedly, I’d say 70% of my problem with them were the demands from users and managers, and being somewhat understaffed.
I could probably handle a few if I had to again, but no more than that.
I’m lucky in that I no longer have to deal with that crap, for the sake of my sanity.
Your experience, obviously a positive one over mine.
Well yeah, locked out due to expiration, no usage.
So what did she do wrong? I understand why a mere password reset wasn’t good enough, I want to know what she did wrong.
I ran a plant for the old and now defunct Westinghouse Electric Corp. I had an IT manager, a Division Sales manager, Plant Controller, etc. reporting to me, and never once had a problem even remotely close to the OPs.
All functions realized that without a sales department and orders none of them had a job. The cooperation was deafening. Of course all the sales guys were electrical engineering grads so maybe that helped.
As a final insult might I say that all departments absolutely loved and adored the IT guys—Honest to God! I’m not kidding.
I remember we at one time or another had both an AS400 and system 38 with Mapics or Copics or something, but I can’t remember which came first.
Loved the OP.
[Blowing Own Horn]In my department, I am Gerald.[/BOH]
I am also, to a lesser extent, DBAman. To wit:
I take rate proposals written in drivel and figure out what sales really wants, then write programming instructions for the IT department.
I take report requests and figure out what they really want (much like the OP but never with actual customers listening in, thank og - mostly I deal with managers and higher). If I can, I write them myself. If it’s over my head, I spec the report for the IT department.
I work in the sales department, and they know they can’t manage without me.
Roddy
She didn’t use the system for a year. For security reasons, it’s assumed that if someone doesn’t log into a critical system for x number of days/months, they’ve probably left the company or moved on to a position where they no longer need that system, but the dipshits in HR forgot to cancel their IDs.
Based on that assumption, the ID is either locked out and/or expired once that timeframe has passed, because even if they haven’t been fired there’s a pretty good chance they just don’t need the system anymore. When you’ve got systems that contain sensitive data like financials, customer info or whatnot, only people who use the system should have access to it… simple as that.
Moral of the story, if a system is really THAT critical, try to login at least once a month.
So we come at the AS400 from very opposite sides it sounds like. I have only ever supported a maximum of two AS400s at a time and basically in house. When I need help, I or in one case the operator are calling IBM directly in all 5 AS400 shops I have been in. They have always been very helpful and more than willing to walk through the odder parts of printer setup. Printer Setup has become very easy compared to the dark days the 90s. Once you get the hang of STRRMTWTR and simple IP usage it is simple. Spool file distribution was made easy by using add-on products like E-Send or Formtastic. Scheduling jobs and running backups is simple and native for most uses. If you need to schedule some particularly unfriendly 3rd party ERP programs there is always Robot from Help system that does an incredible job, though this is a problem with the ERP coding and the AS400. In fact the ERP program I work with is not overly friendly to scheduled month ends. I had it automated in a prior job and it worked well but this is a larger month end and the IT Manager wants the month end done manually. I have it down to a 30-60 minute routine though, so no problem.
The real key to the AS400 is to also have IBM support. When you run into something odd that doesn’t work right or if you are just setting something up for the first time, they have always been very good at walking me through it. Also the IBM user conferences are very well done. I usually go to the regional ones and not Common but Common is huge and you can learn a lot in a few days even after years in the field.
I am not sure I understand why your company was doing AS/400 support. I think I missed something. Were companies using your company to support their AS400s? If so why? Most of the shops I have been in were very small. As few as myself and a single part time operator. (A fun but brutal job that after a while I could not handle but that was because of all the PC and network support that was added to the job as we modernized. It also required trips to NYC at central Jersey pay.)
Not getting it. Presumably she didn’t log on because she didn’t need to. You’re saying that the system (which I don’t suppose she wrote or set up) shut her out after a period of time (for good reasons no doubt). But it didn’t warn her it had shut her out for this reason. She’s just supposed to know, apparently. And she’s at fault for not uselessly logging in when she didn’t need to just to keep an account that she clearly doesn’t need to access much alive? Is it emphasised to her that she needs to do something so tedious?
I have to say that unless someone starts giving background that explains more convincingly why she’s at fault, it sounds to me like typical arrogant blaming and insulting the intelligence of laypeople for not knowing about counter-intuitive, non user friendly aspects of someone else’s system or job.
After all, in the situation that Tristan outlined there were two people involved. One a user who’s job is to do whatever it is that they do and are supposed to have systems that support them, and another who is supposed to know about problems that may arise with those systems. Who of these two should know more about possible reasons why a password reset won’t work?
Apparently, this user is clueless and deserves to die in a fire for not realising that her failure to log on for a long period of time would cause a password reset to fail, but **Tristan **doesn’t seem to feel that he is clueless and deserving to die in a fire because he didn’t know that a password reset failure might be caused by a user not having logged in for a long time, and so to ask the appropriate question. He had a big fat clue in front of him namely that the user had forgotten their password. Why might that be? Hellooo Tristan?
Which of these two people failed in their job? I’m not leaning towards the user, personally.
Jesus Princhester what is wrong with you? Clearly the user by asking the support people to do support was cutting into the support people’s critical locat browsing activities.
I think **Mahna Mahna **was going too far into this. The only real problem was that the user should have mentioned up front about not logging on for about a year. It would have saved the user and **Tristan **time. Not a big deal and you are taking a little venting by Tristan way too seriously.
In no way should **Tristan **be expected to ask right away how long since she last signed in as I am willing to bet he handled dozens of password resets without coming across this problem.
The shop I was in was definitely an enterprise, albeit tiny compared to the company I’m at now. Think large food conglomerate. I wasn’t privy to the contract details between my previous company and IBM, I can only assume it made more sense for the company to have on-site 1st and 2nd level support to resolve issues before contacting IBM. It was usually a last resort to call IBM for problems. It wasn’t anything like other companies using our support staff to support 400’s, but that we had enough of our own 400’s to justify hiring employees as support. We had two Mainframes (not lpars, but 2 boxes with 12 lpars), around 30 AS/400’s in different parts of the world (some clumped together at one site), and I don’t know how many Unix and Windows servers, but close to 2,000.
Princhester, if it were my company, the first thing she would have done wrong is to call me directly. Users must always contact the help desk to get the tickets routed to the appropriate support. The help desk would determine their last logon, and expiration status if any. From there, if a reset is all that is needed, the ticket would go to someone who can easily reset the PW. If expired, it would go to the security group, and they would follow up with the user to have them sign the right forms to re-activate. Users know this, but they call directly without a ticket anyway thinking I’ll be their savior. If they call me first without a ticket, dieing in a fire seems appropriate, considering they should have known the rules.