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Cont: Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11

The Man said:
Well we are customer service technicians and some of my coworkers inevitably disappoint, which does make them a bit bad at their jobs. Not every day can be your first day, week or year. At some point you've got to start catching on figuring things out for yourself and not needing your hand held. Sure you'll make mistakes but just learn from them is all we ask. Yet even that seems too much for some.
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This might be a manifestation of the "packer" vs "mapper" mentality. "Packers" take in bits and pieces of information, wrap them up in paper and tie them with a string, then put it on a shelf. They are unable to relate any information to anything else because all their information is finely segmented.

"Mappers" try to integrate new information with what they already know, continually expanding their knowledge base.

One site I read estimated 80% of the population was "packer," meaning it's difficult to teach them new things. For example, they can lean about mark/copy/paste in the context of a word processor, but if you have to show them how to do it in a web browser it's like they've never heard of it before.
 
Blue Mountain said:
This might be a manifestation of the "packer" vs "mapper" mentality. "Packers" take in bits and pieces of information, wrap them up in paper and tie them with a string, then put it on a shelf. They are unable to relate any information to anything else because all their information is finely segmented.

"Mappers" try to integrate new information with what they already know, continually expanding their knowledge base.

One site I read estimated 80% of the population was "packer," meaning it's difficult to teach them new things. For example, they can lean about mark/copy/paste in the context of a word processor, but if you have to show them how to do it in a web browser it's like they've never heard of it before.
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Sounds about right, pick up insert tab A into slot B no problem when shown but can't extend it to figure out tab J into slot K on their own.

Heck, one guy is constantly writing in his notebook, but ask him 'can you go back to your notebook and review the information we went over last week?' and it's 'nope'. He says the writing stuff down helps him remember things. Well, if that were the case I wouldn't have to ask him to try to review it, he'd remember it. At least if he had it written down in some organized fashion he could review or reference it and wouldn't have to remember it. So a waste of ink and paper for all. Even more so if what he is constantly scribbling is his treatment for a 'Dumb and Dumber: Tres Hombres' movie'
 
Blue Mountain said:
"Mappers" try to integrate new information with what they already know, continually expanding their knowledge base.
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The longer I live, the more I think everything's connected. I never throw away old work anymore, you never know when it'll come in handy for something. Just today I got an unusual request that required quite a lot of outside-the-box thinking that would have taken me days to figure out...if I hadn't actually done something very similar last spring. I was able to take my old code, make a couple of tweaks, and use it for this new purpose. Turned a multi-day job into two or three hours.
 
TragicMonkey said:
The longer I live, the more I think everything's connected. I never throw away old work anymore, you never know when it'll come in handy for something. Just today I got an unusual request that required quite a lot of outside-the-box thinking that would have taken me days to figure out...if I hadn't actually done something very similar last spring. I was able to take my old code, make a couple of tweaks, and use it for this new purpose. Turned a multi-day job into two or three hours.
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For that very reason, JIRA and subversion (SVN) were integrated at my last workplace.

Every piece of code that I wrote was saved in SVN, and every JIRA that caused a piece of code to be written, is preserved in JIRA.

Within JIRA there is an SVN tab on every issue, clicking on that tab, shows you an SVN link to the stored code.

It was elegantly simple, all I had to do was include the JIRA ID (or IDs) in the comments, when checking in the code.

Finding things in JIRA was incredibly simple, the searching functionality (including JQuery) was very powerful. Similarly, in SVN using tools like Tortoise SVN...
 
We just got new guidelines on staff expectations and behaviour, and I noticed one new thing, which is that mobile phones are now no longer permitted at the desk, and must be stowed in drawers or bags.

With the growing reliance on MFA, I don't think this is practical, especially in my job where I have half a dozen different systems all requiring MFA, some of which time out periodically during the day and require renewal.

I get that management doesn't want people messing around with their phones while they're supposed to be working, but it is increasingly common for the phone to be part of the work.
 
arthwollipot said:
We just got new guidelines on staff expectations and behaviour, and I noticed one new thing, which is that mobile phones are now no longer permitted at the desk, and must be stowed in drawers or bags.

With the growing reliance on MFA, I don't think this is practical, especially in my job where I have half a dozen different systems all requiring MFA, some of which time out periodically during the day and require renewal.

I get that management doesn't want people messing around with their phones while they're supposed to be working, but it is increasingly common for the phone to be part of the work.
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Also why the heck should someone have to use their own personnel phone for work? Recently new workers have had to set up a MFA app on their own personal phones and it has yet to work well. We work in basically a giant Faraday cage so the only cell phone access is by the customer Wi-Fi which constantly needs reactivation and new ID and passwords. Which you can't get if you can't get onto the Wi-Fi to get into your E-mail to request and get a new guest Wi-Fi ID and PW.

You want me to use a cell phone for MFA, fine you provide the phone and then make sure I have cell access wherever I need to do my job and use MFA.
 
arthwollipot said:
We just got new guidelines on staff expectations and behaviour, and I noticed one new thing, which is that mobile phones are now no longer permitted at the desk, and must be stowed in drawers or bags.

With the growing reliance on MFA, I don't think this is practical, especially in my job where I have half a dozen different systems all requiring MFA, some of which time out periodically during the day and require renewal.
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I've gotten multiple trouble calls to that effect "So and so insurance site or hospital portal needs to send me a code to login, but I can't have my phone out at my desk."

The best I can tell them is that's an admin/HR problem, not a technical one.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I've gotten multiple trouble calls to that effect "So and so insurance site or hospital portal needs to send me a code to login, but I can't have my phone out at my desk."

The best I can tell them is that's an admin/HR problem, not a technical one.
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I've been meaning to post a whine/rant about SMS messaging to landline phones (mostly they just disappear with no indication of a problem with delivery) but I can almost solve this one. I have Microsoft's PhoneLink installed on my android phone and my Win 10 computer. As long as they are in Bluetooth range I get a popup with e the text message on my desktop. So I can keep my phone in my desk (pant's pocket actually). ;)
 
In a prior (and dreadful) position I had to not only carry my own personal phone for work, but I also had to have a work cell phone, and when on-call there was a separate on-call phone! It felt ridiculous, walking around with three damn phones and sometimes being on more than one at a time.
 
Blue Mountain said:
In theory you don't need a smartphone to receive an SMS; an older feature phone should do the trick. Still, purchasing, deploying, and supporting 8.000 feature phones would be a big and probably expensive project.
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Most MFA I've seen recently aren't SMS based, they just generate a time-limited one time password through an app. The cheapest alternative are the keychain token generators like these.
 
arthwollipot said:
Because the government can't afford to buy new smartphones for all ~8,000 staff.
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Plus you will find that most people don't want a second phone, even just for work purposes. Seen this time and time again, a company wanting staff to have work apps/data available on their phone but people want it on their personal phones. Personally, I would rather have a company supplied second phone BUT my views are out of step with most folk.
 
Mongrel said:
Most MFA I've seen recently aren't SMS based, they just generate a time-limited one time password through an app. The cheapest alternative are the keychain token generators like these.
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Had one of these yesterday, for some reason had to relog into my Gmail email account on my iPad. For verification it wanted a code from the authenticator app, the authenticator app that popped up its notification with the number, note this is the authenticator app on the same device! Someone hasn't thought this through...
 
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Darat said:
Plus you will find that most people don't want a second phone, even just for work purposes. Seen this time and time again, a company wanting staff to have work apps/data available on their phone but people want it on their personal phones. Personally, I would rather have a company supplied second phone BUT my views are out of step with most folk.
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I insisted on a second, company-financed phone if they wanted me to work that way. Stuffed if they were going to have access to my personal handset for any reason.
 
arthwollipot said:
Because the government can't afford to buy new smartphones for all ~8,000 staff.
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Then perhaps the government should reconsider it's MFA requirements. Starting with liability if their chosen MFA app causes problems on an employee's device.
 
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I cut the difference. I get a 50 buck a month cell phone stipend (which would be enough to get a second line / phone if I wanted) and I just use Google Voice to get a second virtual phone number. I can even set it so it goes automatically to voice mail when I'm off and not on call.
 
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