I Helped Create a Monster! IT Guru...

[cdaigle430]

That always-on-call-thing must be a slippery slope.

I read about minimum wage jobs where they can send you back home if there isn't enough work that day or call you up if they need more help. Either way, the employee is expected to be available, but not paid beyond the hours at work.

Saw a fair compromise at a machine shop with lights-out, 24 hr operation on weekends. Automated equipment that calls you when something malfunctions. Employee agrees to be on call for a few dollars/hr that weekend and gets a full wage for the hours they have to actually go in to correct the malfunction.

How does it work with these tech jobs?

I am salary America is bad when it comes to IT employees-we have no rights really but that is a different subject. My Canadian colleagues (I am the only American) all are hourly and get OT or paid for being on call.

 

[MossRoad]

VMS ruled! microVAX, VAX, Alpha. I just got rid of an AlphaServer 2100 the other day....that's another of my three favorite stories!

We were a big DEC house.

I disliked VMS! :laughing: And I disliked the VAX.

I loved my SUN servers and UNIX. They sent me to school for UNIX system admin and I was the sole support for that. We replaced the VAX's with Alphas, and eventually the VMS went away and they ran NT on Alphas, as well as UNIX.

Compaq bought DEC. HP bought Compaq. By the time I left we were running (I think I recall) windows 2008 r2 on HP and DELL servers. I shut down the last Alpha system around 2015.

DEC had great support. Compaq bought them for their support system and their RAID technology, and kinda started gutting customer support. HP had decent support too, with it still being most of the old DEC guys. They were like family to us.

I started out with SQL 6 and was in the process of going to 12 when I switched out of I.T.

Databases are very cool. I do miss messing with those.

Anyhow, I got a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, they put food on my table (they paid for the table, too), heat in my house, and my kids through college. I have no regrets on that part of my life.

 

[MossRoad]

I am salary America is bad when it comes to IT employees-we have no rights really but that is a different subject. My Canadian colleagues (I am the only American) all are hourly and get OT or paid for being on call.

I had a boss that conspired with the HR manager to remove me from salary and make me hourly, but exempt from overtime. They showed me some labor laws that applied specifically to I.T. workers with "special skills" and said I had to take it or leave it. So I took it... to a labor lawyer. :laughing:

The labor lawyer read the labor laws and told me that yes, they were correct. I did qualify as a worker with "special skills" and they could do that to me. No OT for you. Bummer. But then he told me they neglected to turn the page and keep reading, where it said something about having to pay a 4-5X minimum wage, with worked out to about $26 per hour minimum (at the time). I was making $14. :laughing:

So I took it up with my boss's boss who was also the HR manager's boss, showed them the FULL laws on the "special skills", then showed them a detailed log of my time for the last 6 months. I got an apology from the both of them in front of the boss's boss, a compensation check, a sizable raise, and moved back to salary pretty quickly. :laughing:

 

[riptides]

We were a big DEC house.

I disliked VMS! :laughing: And I disliked the VAX.

I loved my SUN servers and UNIX. They sent me to school for UNIX system admin and I was the sole support for that. We replaced the VAX's with Alphas, and eventually the VMS went away and they ran NT on Alphas, as well as UNIX.

Compaq bought DEC. HP bought Compaq. By the time I left we were running (I think I recall) windows 2008 r2 on HP and DELL servers. I shut down the last Alpha system around 2015.

DEC had great support. Compaq bought them for their support system and their RAID technology, and kinda started gutting customer support. HP had decent support too, with it still being most of the old DEC guys. They were like family to us.

I started out with SQL 6 and was in the process of going to 12 when I switched out of I.T.

Databases are very cool. I do miss messing with those.

Anyhow, I got a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, they put food on my table (they paid for the table, too), heat in my house, and my kids through college. I have no regrets on that part of my life.

LOL. My first dealings with DEC were at NASA. PDP's. and VAX 11/780's. There at NASA another agency called on me. Was looking at something special one day. That started the global trots with DEC.

Back then it was always the Unix crowd giving us grief. Then those upstarts with NT. Belch I'd say, my iron could run all three operating systems...in cluster too!

LOL.

Microsoft is finally where we were 20 years ago.

There is really nothing new in IT as far as concepts. Well maybe quantum computers and elliptical curve cryptography.

 

[MossRoad]

LOL. My first dealings with DEC were at NASA. PDP's. and VAX 11/780's. There at NASA another agency called on me. Was looking at something special one day. That started the global trots with DEC.

Back then it was always the Unix crowd giving us grief. Then those upstarts with NT. Belch I'd say, my iron could run all three operating systems...in cluster too!

LOL.

Microsoft is finally where we were 20 years ago.

There is really nothing new in IT as far as concepts. Well maybe quantum computers and elliptical curve cryptography.

Forgot about our PDP 11s. I was told to walk softly around them or I'd crash the disk packs. Things looked like top-load washing machines. :laughing:

I had a user giving me grief and flinging insults about how incompetent we were when trying to save a story she was writing on her VT173 after she pushed the wrong buttons. I couldn't take it anymore. This is the only time I ever let a user get the best of me....

I walked from her desk to the computer room, over to the console, VTL'd her out, and VTL'd her back in, which effectively wiped her session and she lost her work. Then I advanced the paper feed, removed the evidence, and reloaded the paper. I've felt bad about that for 33 years. However, this is the same person that would spill coffee in her keyboard monthly despite the ban on beverages at work stations, so I eventually got over it.

 

[om21braz]

Came close to going down that road. Studied, took classes, bought a little network equipment, learned a little programming - then went and passed Cisco CCNA first time. Then had an instructor possibly do me a favor. He told me I needed to keep studying and buy about 10 grand worth of routers to "play" with in order to stand a chance to get, I think to CCNE level, in order to get a job actually touching internet routers. That took the wind out of my sails.

 

[Macinnis]

Forgot about our PDP 11s. I was told to walk softly around them or I'd crash the disk packs. Things looked like top-load washing machines. :laughing:

I had a user giving me grief and flinging insults about how incompetent we were when trying to save a story she was writing on her VT173 after she pushed the wrong buttons. I couldn't take it anymore. This is the only time I ever let a user get the best of me....

I walked from her desk to the computer room, over to the console, VTL'd her out, and VTL'd her back in, which effectively wiped her session and she lost her work. Then I advanced the paper feed, removed the evidence, and reloaded the paper. I've felt bad about that for 33 years. However, this is the same person that would spill coffee in her keyboard monthly despite the ban on beverages at work stations, so I eventually got over it.

Lol. Reminds me of a vp who was a complete *** and tried multiple times to throw me under the buss.

He was sales oriented and would literally make me code it so that the sales were inflated so that his sales people would make more commission- took this to my boss and he said ‘just do it like he asked’ so I did. 8 months later the project was done...his boss starts reviewing the reports and immediately says “ these numbers don’t add up”. I was like no ****.

Anyway, whenever he would piss me off, I would change his password from his last name to something else. He would call, I can’t get into the system...what’s my password? Mike, it’s your last name (as I got back into the database and changed it back to his last name)...can you not remember your last name?

 

[MossRoad]

:laughing:

 

[MossRoad]

Boy, those were some fun days. :laughing: Mind you, I'm still having fun => then, but they were fun times. Exciting.

I think the worst bone-head move I made was on one of my UNIX systems. I was running low on disk space and went looking for large files as suspects. I found one particularly large file and moved it to another disk. That gained me enough space and the system went on it's merry way for a couple months.

Then one day we had a power outage and the system wouldn't come back up. It kept saying something about cannot locate kernel.........


:laughing:

 

[MossRoad]

I remember getting service notices about a problem with some version of Windows that would cause the system to lock up if it wasn't rebooted every 29 days or something like that.

Our biggest question was how did anyone get a windows system to stay up long enough to find that problem? :laughing:

 

[JethroB]

I spent the first half of my accounting career on the IBM S36 and then AS (Baby)36. My company bought a JD Edwards software
package in 1985 along with the source code as they had discontinued it for $50,000. Boy did we ever get our moneys worth out of that software, 15 years.

 

[Racenut]

30 years of IT and still going... I used to love it. Now I question my career choices daily. If I could have the job without all the responsibility, would still be a good time. But when the phone rings in the middle of the night... I hate it.

 

[riptides]

Back in the day, computers would fill rooms. Storage, Calculating Processors and CPU's were their own box farms. And the cooling systems were pretty impressive too. Paper tape, Card Reads and toggles required to boot. Certification that you have completed "boot training" was a plus.

One of my best know mistakes, I fell into a pattern, "Do you want to format the flight pack?" YES.

That put some serious hardware in safe mode. LOL. Someone had switched disk plugs on me when I was not looking. Yeah...disk plugs...the one with the "0" is the one that was being used at the time.

Always check your plugs against the label. Never format a flight pack.

 

[riptides]

I remember getting service notices about a problem with some version of Windows that would cause the system to lock up if it wasn't rebooted every 29 days or something like that.

Our biggest question was how did anyone get a windows system to stay up long enough to find that problem? :laughing:

Uptime was always important to customers. I had one call that required a flight out of town. While examining the system the datacenter manager asked me not to lean on a particular microVAX. Since it was in the particular systems floorspace I inquired as to "what it is?". The response "I don't know". That set off another investigation. Turned out that little microVAX had been honoring x25 gateway load requests for years. It ran out of disk space, and the show memory command had nothing but asterisks for all its resource monitors. But it was still running. We also had to track down the x25 gateways to turn them off. There were over eight of them, on different parts of the planet! I should have captured the monitor displays, as uptime back then was a serious competitive edge. It would have made computer news back then.

 

[Frankenkubota]

These are the days of miracle and wonder!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

 

[czechsonofagun]

These are the days of miracle and wonder!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

Thirty years of IT and I keep the important stuff - like my reloading data, tractor maintenance, implement and project drawings, etc. on paper in pencil.

 

[Frankenkubota]

Thirty years of IT and I keep the important stuff - like my reloading data, tractor maintenance, implement and project drawings, etc. on paper in pencil.

That, imho, is a good idea. Pretty much every invoice and stmt i get is in paper and everyone says, go paperless. That's great until you actually need to see the invoice and

A....Can't find it

B......Powers out again

c.....Our networks down

D.....Our IT dept is working on it.....

E....fill in the blank

Once in the 80s it took me almost a full year to get the cable tv co to stop charging me and that I was current. I'd lost all my data on the pewter so i was helpless.

*Good thing I had all my data on bubble memory! maybe not

 

[jmc]

^^^^

E....The company wanting you to go paperless only keeps your records for two years.

 

[cdaigle430]

That, imho, is a good idea. Pretty much every invoice and stmt i get is in paper and everyone says, go paperless. That's great until you actually need to see the invoice and

A....Can't find it

B......Powers out again

c.....Our networks down

D.....Our IT dept is working on it.....

E....fill in the blank

Once in the 80s it took me almost a full year to get the cable tv co to stop charging me and that I was current. I'd lost all my data on the pewter so i was helpless.

*Good thing I had all my data on bubble memory! maybe not

I still have punch cards LOL

 

[Oaktree]

One of my best know mistakes, I fell into a pattern, "Do you want to format the flight pack?" YES.

That put some serious hardware in safe mode. LOL. Someone had switched disk plugs on me when I was not looking. Yeah...disk plugs...the one with the "0" is the one that was being used at the time.

Always check your plugs against the label. Never format a flight pack.

Not familiar with the term "flight pack", but yeah I remember those old CDC drives with the drive # plugs on them. The large drives' packs must have weighed 40 lb and had a whopping capacity of 300meg (unformatted). The smaller ones were 80 I believe. In the early 70s we worked with drum memory drives...a unit the size of a washing machine had 8m capacity! Could barely store a Word document or an mp3 file on it today, but back then we thought it was huge. If you had a head crash, heaven help you...the whole unit had to be shipped back to the factory.

Someone mentioned tiptoeing around disc drives. Yeah, those did experience a lot of head crashes. Always hated it when some idiot would either cycle a crashed pack thru several drives or conversely cycle several (formerly) good packs thru a crashed drive. Job security for the technician!!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

I worked in a tech field for most of my working life, and I think that's the major reason (with a smattering of crabby old guy) why I have no interest in so much of the modern tech gadgetry..."smart" homes, etc. Don't even have a smart phone, nor do I want one. I think I'm just "teched" out.
Yeah, I'll check out something that looks like it might improve my life, but so much of it just seems to be clutter.