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: