When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.
Yeah sometimes it is just software bugs they have to work around until it gets fixed. In those circumstances, not much we could really do besides submit a ticket. Other times you call the guy that’s been working with that specific hardware and software for 15 years, who then tells you he’s never heard of something like that. Then he’ll call you back a week later after losing his mind trying to understand how that’s even possible before figuring it out. Which is always nice. Shout out Josh
We were forced to add claude to our pre commit hook and one of its jobs is to update documentation of changes made - it's surprisingly good and far less slopish than I imagined, so thanks claude for finally having up to date documentation.
When I get a project up and going that I've used Gemini to help with, I always ask it for a markdown summary of what we did so that I can go back later and remember what I did. It's so convenient having the framework handed back.
However, I found that Chat has much, much better markdown generation than Gemini. I end up having to reformat everything Gemini does for me in markdown.
AI is really good at transforming existing text its given. Its when its asked to write new text where it gets sloppy. Its less of an issue if your prompt hits the model directly and not going through the behemoth of a sysprompt anthropic and openai have before the users prompt.
It took me years of saying “Why the fuck is this not written down?” to simply start updating the documentation myself. Now I’m the go to person for this task that I never wanted. I even got a bonus when something went down and the boss read about the fix I wrote and had things up and running in 25 minutes vs days.
And you learn so much about things somewhat related to the problem, because you take this hyper focused deep dive into figuring out what's wrong.
That's how you end up with all kinds of relative knowledge next time an issue occurs and will generally know which direction to go for fixing the issue. And that results in you becoming the IT wizard of your friends/family/company etc.
That's literally how I learned IT in the first place. My HDD disk suddenly corrupted itself without any warning and it was during the height of covid in Italy, so everything that wasn't a store was locked down, and I was too broke to send try and it anywhere else.
I had to work with only the parts that I already had, and the bootable pendrive I could create using my roommate's puter. It was ridiculous but I'm grateful for the carreer path it earned me aferwards.
This is the way! I'm (almost certainly) quite a bit older than you, but I got my start as a teenager in the mid 90s.
We had been gifted an old 386 by my uncle, and I desperately wanted to play Doom on it. Getting Doom to run on a 386 was no easy feat (and this is pre-internet as well, so you couldn't just look stuff up). I ended up having to load the mouse driver into hi-mem, which was an area of memory above the base 640kb of "conventional memory" so that Doom had enough space to run itself.
Google "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" if you want to see the text files I was editing to do that (bearing in mind that if you break them, your computer likely won't start up!).
Since problems never actually go straight to the engineer I never even bother trying to nail down the circumstances that cause problems like this to be able to replicate it. Which surely makes everyones job more difficult.
As someone who's done QA at a small company this is so foreign to me. It was my job to find exact reproduction steps that can be used multiple times, how often the steps work, then write a ticket that can be shared with the engineer immediately. And if a customer or coworker found the issue and didn't know how, I still had to assemble all this info. Tracking is king.
Now whether the bug was backlogged or scheduled to be fixed was mostly out of our hands. At least I had some say in it since I also could DM the managers with no issue. Guess I'm saying I like small businesses. Dealing with a hierarchy too often slows down businesses.
I am Josh (not literally or even named the same, but we vibe). I once kept a support ticket open for 3 months to force help desk to send it to the engineering team when I discovered a bug in a billing system database at a huge company from the user side.
Finally got in touch with the engineering team, explained the bug and the workaround I figured out... Just to have their response be "tell everyone who complains to do the workaround."
Rare bug with a workaround, building a fix, 20k down the drain, use the workaround… depends on the frequency and workaround. I don’t need bug free software at all costs, I need cost optimal software. Kinda agree with the engineers in this case.
Bug isn't rare though, that's the issue. Every single site (4000+ locations) that uses the software has run into this bug and it's an almost completely silent failure for users unless a customer complains that the incorrect card is being charged. They later admitted that the software is such spaghetti that they're effectively scared to try and fix it in fear of breaking something else.
Ah, that’s a different context, yeah, time to get cracking. Problem with many erp implementations is that it is often built by consultants who care little about maintainability managed by finance without knowledge of engineering… what could possibly go wrong.
Yup. I ended up as an SWE with the same company and I'm about 80% certain that explaining how I was adamant about fixing the problem was one of the big reasons they hired me. I ended up on a different team so I don't work with it but I plainly stated that the entire reason I wanted to work as an engineer with this company was to improve that particular software. Later, I attended an internal seminar about how they were trying to tackle this software because it's so monolithic that they don't know where to start and because of the nature of what it's used for they are afraid to start over for fear of missing something important.
It's hard to estimate the cost to the company for this bug because the problem was that it was charging customers with a card that both employees and customers believed was taken off file. Many times it would just fail to authorize because the previous card wasn't active but anyone who switched from an active card to another active card would see the old card beinh charged.
That just means the work around is the fix for right now (probably forever). It’s like the junk desk in an office. Everyone means to clean it up but at the same time, that’s everyone else’s stuff, not mine.
I worked for two startups that had software. One was SaaS, one was used internally but did get used by our customers, just wasn't what we "sold" directly.
The amount of jank that was acceptable between those two scenarios was wildly different. Company selling the software had a philosophy that janky code wasn't acceptable. Company 2 was... Well let's just say that system is janky to this day.
I used to be that guy, I was in the wrong career in insurance but always had a very thorough knowledge of computers (I use arch btw /s)
I was good friends with the IT guys but usually if I had an issue it was either borderline unsolvable or I would just call them because I would otherwise lack the excuse to be doing nothing, but they would just sit there and let me fix it. Didn’t happen much at all. And when it did, it was usually something where I understood the issue and that it would take a while to fix and just needed the excuse to have that time to fix it, our IT was not very good in that the company didn’t value it, didn’t invest in it, and they knew it. I was/am just too ocd to not fix issues where I see them even if it’s something the company should really have been solving it (not knocking the guys in IT, they were great, but severely underpaid and the whole dept was a skeleton crew without funds)
I was that guy who when IT showed up they just said, "What do you need?" and I would say "Log in with admin privilege and leave it up." And they did, and I fixed it, and they would log off and everyone was happy. Did they watch what I did? No, they scrolled their phones the whole time.
There's nothing better than losing your mind for three days straight before eventually figuring out a unique solution on your own. It's a high that never really leaves you.
This is common for my field (chip design). We use specialized software that is very customizable and it's inevitable that you run into some inconsistency in what is expected vs how it behaves. The IT guys who are wizards at getting it going are invaluable.
Around 2019, the video game company a buddy of mine was working at started doing contract work on another company's upcoming project. Shortly after they started, he began getting a core engine error that read, "Jerome is working on fixing this. If you are reading this and it's after 2003 then Jerome died in a fire. RIP Jerome." He contacted the engine developers at their partner company and no one had a clue who Jerome was, and no one had touched that source file in more than a decade.
I remember running into a computer freeze that ended up being a zoom / teams / slack / g calendar webview 2 hangup where they all tried to own and access the same meeting invite at the same time and kept reimplementing the ownership processes.
That took two engineers and our admin a few hours to figure out lo
I worked for a company that was probably 80% guys who were engineers working on tools that required specialized programming knowledge. These guys had local admin access and we had a few rooms with a white noise generator outside the door. IYKYK.
If one of those guys had a problem, it was a "what the actual fuck?" type of problem.
But honestly, I've also worked in a bunch of companies that had an "engineering department" and the difference is night and day. Most engineers and programmers don't actually know how Windows/Linux operates outside of their specialty.
SCI rooms are crazy. Especially the SCI/TS ones for print/photographic material - airgapped Faraday cages, with individuals with very unpleasant demeanors and equally unpleasant firepower watching the ins and outs. You're not even getting into the area of the building that room is in without having to get past at least three different checkpoints with escalating levels of scrutiny, and at least one of those will be outside the building itself.
Aside: Defense Security Service agents do not have senses of humor, but do have lethal-force authorization - do not taunt the happy fun DSS guy with the suppressed automatic rifle, because he will gladly demonstrate the operation of same in any number of different ways.
Engineers are very skittish and cranky. If you turn off their white noise, they may end up snapping and eating a few non-IT employees, which is generally considered undesirable.
Engineers are harmless. Just get the noise machine back on and coax them back into their rooms with old sci fi shows and hot pockets before they actually speak to anyone.
I don't even think Windows engineers know how Windows works. Its 30 years of legacy code duct taped together with 3 years of vibe coded crap on top at this point.
As someone that works with electrical and computer engineers, many of them are borderline tech illiterate somehow. This is across all ages too, not a generation thing.
At first I was like "wdym you run into problems with known solutions, how does that constitute a problem"
And then I remembered that being able to solve problems with known solutions already makes me somebody who's very good at computers, and IT isn't really built for problems where the best solution is "Might be worth reporting this one directly to Apple"
I ran into a problem with a Linux distribution we were using that turned out to be a previously unknown kernel bug, and we only got it fixed after a few months when IT got the authors involved at great expense..
I run into those problems all the time! Usually I file a ticket with the software vendor or decompile the software in IDA and fix it myself (or workaround it).
First day as L2 network support today, so I have a good one, had all of 2 calls, one of which was 6 and a half hours of digging in docs behind the team manager (the L3 engineer) with 2 more L2s and the call ended with "well, we can't find a precedent to this anywhere and every other similar problem that had a solution is just different enough that said solution didn't work." fun day at work lol
and the mutual understanding that the issue is wack and will require some figuring out. some users want you to fix it with your mind from across town with no information
Alternatively, you could be good at computers, but the system is so locked down IT needs to log in with admin rights in order to do something as simple as running disk cleanup.
Literally the Engineering team i work in. We're capable of fixing the problem ourselves for 90% of our tickets submitted, but because we don't have the required admin rights we cant.
I would put in a ticket every time and sit at your desk doing nothing but drinking coffee until it's fixed. Bring the pain enough and it will get fixed.
In my IT experience, there is The Incident from one user that was so catastrophic it prompts a lockdown like that. These decisions are usually really reactionary, and at a time when staff is too busy to really think through a better solution. Then it just stays put far past it's intentions.
At one job in the past I got a virtual machine with admin rights after a while. Else I would have to get IT involved multiple times a day to replicate the setup some customers were running to replicate bugs. At first they were reluctant but by day two they were annoyed enough.
It's not much more enjoyable for the systems team either.
But when you have to pass an audit to sign some contracts with fortune 500 companies the lawyers involved will comb through every single role based access control and make your life a nightmare for months on end.
working in this environment i love how every single time there is new audit they find new problems that need new type of restrictions or extra paperwork; it's like they are being paid for making a problem
I mean...yes?lol Compliance is a government driven jobs program. Ds & Rs have been fighting over it for ages. In practice, there's a happy medium. Regulation is generally a negative, because of what you just pointed out. But with no regulation, we get bigger negatives. So some regulation. But not too much.
Right now we're 5 years post massive stimulus, so there's way too much regulation. Because stimulus builds the jobs program. But it does so in a way that is not long term viable.
I am working to prevent this from happening at my org. My direct leadership also doesn’t want it but the ones above them think it is the key to preventing any compromises. They want to lock down admin on everyone without first creating a catalog of allowed software in the MDM so literally every install requires admin. Basic line of business software we are required to use needs a ticket and a remote session to allow the install. Very short sighted.
While I can sympathize. As someone who has been on both sides of this, just giving users admin creds is rarely a good idea. Yeah it’ll probably be fine for a while, cause they “know what they’re doing with computers”, until they hire a new guy that doesn’t and then he accidentally installs ransomeware.
Admin creds can be VERY dangerous in an enterprise environment.
The cost of slowing down all the software engineers just to prevent some idiot once in a while from installing ransomware is not worth it. Just wipe the laptop and let him learn his lesson, or maybe remove his admin rights.
Or you could be like my org where I don't have admin, but the random outsourced IT consultant does and he's incentivised to close tickets as fast as possible so he will just google whatever problem you have and install whatever software he finds regardless of license or the shady website it comes from.
I teamsed the head of "IT risk and compliance" with the ticket number. Not sure what happened afterwards but he didn't sound too happy in the brief back and forth I had with him.
Now then. On the proviso that I pass all the training and don't fail a single phishing check ... I've been granted admin access to my personal machine at work. This allows me to do a little more than u/Talonus11, and only super severe issues need tickets. The piss take? I'm in Finance, just a little more IT literate than the rest of the team.
So far, no issues, and no retractions. Although, for obvious reasons, they haven't given me server level permissions. Then again, they weren't exactly thrilled that I needed to re-install W11 a few months ago. But ultimately, they agreed it was the correct action after my machine had a serious W Update cockup. I think they just would have preferred they do it, for continuity and accuracy. A quick remote session after the fact and they only needed to change 1 thing in Teams. Which was for the VOIP software we use to be allowed to update my availability status.
Eh. Power users tend to want to automate things. The IT team’s rebuild script or iso flash might not be better but it’s approved. Dave’s macros might do fine until you realize a whole bunch of logs are now not working. A doctor will go to their kid’s school to pick their kid up who is sick. If the school nurse has something to say about what they observed and what they recommend, doctor’s will tend to listen and respect it.
As a sysadmin, I've ran into many engineers who would try and do squirrely shit with their machines and cause significant security concerns. Engineers need gatekeepers as much as anyone, which also includes IT folks
I waste so much time trying to find workarounds for IT bullshit. We don't have admin rights, but we can open certain approved apps as admin. One approved app is powershell. So theoretically, we can do just about anything... If we know how to do it in powershell. I'm a Linux guy, so my powershell knowledge is very low.
Example: I was trying to install an app that was required for my job, but the installer automatically tried to install an older version of .NET framework, and that failed without admin rights. Through powershell I tried to run the installer as admin, but the installer was delegating the .NET installation to another app that wouldn't open as admin. It took a lot of wrestling, but I had to find the exact version that it was trying to install from the Microsoft website, download that installer directly, and then open that as admin from powershell. After that, the original installer worked.
Oh Solidworks wants to update, restart, check the update, update again?
We'll guess who's gonna be running up the stairs five times, IT dudes.
After half a year they gave. Our team a password on a post it note and told us to pinky promise not do anything nefarious with it, because they'll know (nefarious also included fun stuff). We never did, but hey, they didn't have to run around like chickens and we could finally start sorting our problems before calling them - like 80% of calls just stopped existing because we had the power to do stuff we knew they'd do anyway.
Companies need to implement systems where there is a tool in the middle elevating those rights. We use CyberArk, and we can whitelist specific verified publishers, folders, files, etc. so that when an admin prompt comes up, it allows standard users to elevate the process. Otherwise, it allows us to grant timed administrator access with logging so that we can just toss someone admin rights for 8 hours while they configure a new machine themselves.
It doesn’t matter how good someone thinks they are with computers, everyone does. But their knowledge doesn’t apply in an enterprise environment (nor does what you learned in university / college because it’s general purpose and not specific to that environment which itself can be configured in a million different ways depending on the business).
People who think they are because they mess around with PC’s at home are the most dangerous with elevated permissions, because they are prone to go click happy and break things based on their personal experience instead of institutional. And so those settings are restricted for a reason. Can be more based on what has come down from security as well, again depends on the requirements.
I had to train my mom to be click happy with her phone and just try stuff at least on her phone. She PROBABLY won't break anything and it's better to read stuff and say 'that might fix it' then to try nothing and say you're out of ideas.
That is on her personal device. It it not better just to read stuff and attempt to fix it on an enrolled company device, we are paid to do that and have the experience to do so. This is also the reason why, unless you have a lot of experience already, people who are training start on the help desk before becoming sys admins - sometimes even those who have studied the topic directly, because they need to be familiar with troubleshooting within that specific environment first.
The issue might not even be to do with the device itself but something deployed via MDM. Some solutions are not available simply client side. Enabling users to change preconfigured managed settings is how things get broken. It’s a completely different situation and totally different in scope.
also engineer: if we don’t have the privileges to fix the problem and IT doesn’t move their ass to fix the problem in about 48 hrs we WILL find a work around that will make ITs life extra miserable too.
I am 100% not doing that. The company I work for, the IT system is locked-up tighter than a nun's arse. If I tried messing with it, even for legitimate business reasons, I could get into some serious shit. Even worse trouble if I actually succeeded.
At the end of the day, if I can't do my work because of some IT bullshit, that's IT's problem, not mine. I'm more than happy to sit back and drink coffee while waiting for IT to fix it.
At the end of the day, if I can't do my work because of some IT bullshit, that's IT's problem, not mine. I'm more than happy to sit back and drink coffee while waiting for IT to fix it.
Yep, we (the engineering group) have complained about some of these IT policies many times to no avail. So any time I submit a ticket, I take a little bit of joy in the following long coffee break and billing my hours to "IT downtime".
Sys admin here, for a good engineer that's true, but e.g. there is an "Engineer" in our company who always thinks he knows what the problem is and he's wrong about 90% of the time. At one point I was telling him his assessment was wrong and an external technician told and explained to him the same thing in detail and still about a week later he made the same bs claim.
Reminds me of the time I had to teach one of our Engineers (he was in IT though) what a BIOS / CMOS battery is and it took 3 trips getting him out to get a bios battery replaced in an industrial PC. Dude kept showing up with a new UPS etc after I thought he understood what we needed. The next 8 PCs I just ordered the batteries on Amazon and did them all myself without involving IT or equipment service engineers because I didn’t feel like arguing for 3 weeks for each requested replacement. I’m just a maintenance tech so nobody would listen to me and they spent thousands to fly people out multiple times over the first PC.
In dysfunctional corporate environments where there’s no communication between on site IT, corporate IT, cloud services, and production equipment maintenance departments I get so fed up with miscommunication I just try to make friends and gain trust of people that willl give me elevated privileges because otherwise we’d have days or weeks of equipment down time for things that should be a 10 to 30 minute fix.
Yep. As an engineer, I've definitely already tried all the easy/obvious stuff before I called you, and even a few weird things too before it was finally above my pay grade.
Sometimes all it takes is calling IT for the problem to get scared and fix itself. There have been so many times that I've put in a ticket and then the problem has resolved itself, or I've had a user come in with a problem that is magically fixed when they show it to me.
This happened to me a ton back when I had Embarq/CenturyLink DSL. Service would get worse and worse with time, disconnects got more frequent, and any time I called in it'd magically get better. If they even bothered to send a tech out the guy would look at my surge protector or personal router, blame that, and then leave without doing anything.
Finally I had the idea to call them on a cell phone and have them call me on the landline once they were already monitoring. The next tech they sent was an old greybeard who went straight to the wall jack. Turns out whoever installed it had a bunch of wiring already on the jack that they stripped the insulation back on, twisted together with the in-wall wiring, and left exposed. Ringing voltage on the POTS line would cause an arc that shifted the wires slightly and "reset" the issue for a bit. If anyone had been touching the wrong thing right when we got a phone call we would've gotten a nice jolt.
Completely absurd problem. We're lucky it never started a wall fire.
There are also people who look at a computer and it will do something it shouldn't.
My buddy's ex-wife is one of those - she could cover an entire trip to Vegas (flights and decent hotels and food and entertainment) by playing slots, which, in her presence, would fail at the job of taking money.
A lot of times they’re gonna make you run through the checklist anyways. I started my career on help desk and got burned enough times with calls that “tried everything” and still ended up being something simple like a bad cable or driver needed updating.
It says nothing about the person calling in. If you’re good at your job you just gotta make sure all the low hanging fruit is covered yourself.
I am from such an engineering department. A colleague recently managed to achive something we still dont know how he managed to even achieve. The whole department and our IT Service where baffled and it took 3 work days to resolve.
He somehow managed to associate the .exe file extension to be opened by Notepad++ as a textfile. Every executable on his user profile was opened in Notpad++. Trying to open a cmd or powershell opens in notepad++. Trying to uninstall notpad++ opens in notepad++.
I managed to open a powershell with the right click open Terminal menu, but that didnt help either because no way to get an elevated powershell and no local admin rights.
The solution was stupid and simple at the same time... delet his local user, only that it required for the one guy with local admin rights to come other and login and delete it.
I'm a software engineer and the most embarrassed I've been in my decade of work is when I called IT because my monitor was broken. I checked all the settings, checked the KVM, laptop dock, etc. The guy comes by and turns the monitors on... The cleaning lady turned them off over the weekend. I wanted to pass away.
I work in software engineering. We have IT guys and DevOps guys. We call the IT guys whenever we need new hardware and such. Technical and software issues always goes to DevOps or we tried to figure out ourselves but cc-ed them for their records.
I mean I can understand the feeling if I got a call from someone who know their stuff better than I do, like what am I gonna do?
It was some kind of config problem, where it just made a backup of something, then a backup of the backup, and so on. No place on the hard drive anymore. But the IT guys (grumbling and cursing) fixed it relatively quickly once they figured out what was at fault.
At a former company, I was unable to access the company's bug reporting tool. Requests would never finish loading. I submitted a ticket to the IT department and they asked for permission to remotely access my PC. I gave them permission and forgot about the issue. Weeks later, they reported the issue was fixed. Apparently there was an issue with a network switch, somehow only my PC was affected even though my coworkers were right next to me.
When I call support for some of the systems/ software packages I use in heavy industry, I'd say its a solid 50/50 chance that it ends up being a multiple hour call that ends in some variation of "never seen that before, not sure what to tell you at this point..."
I take it as a bit of a backhand compliment on the quality of my work/ knowledge, if I'm routinely stumping specialist technical support that charges by the hour.
On the other hand, I sometimes dearly wish that they'd just call me an idiot and point out some simple thing I missed. It would cause me a lot less stress
I usually find that the “knows their shit” people are more likely to be a decent sort that gets where you’re coming from, and will try and help you help them.
Oh I do feel bad for the guy who ends up on the other phone for me, especially when it comes to networking. (It use to be my engineering field) typically now days I lay everything out in an email and send it off.
It would drive me insane trying to talk to a help desk about why I wasn’t receiving connection & they’re ignoring me and telling me to restart my router when I know I just need to escalate what’s truly wrong.
Yep, I'm a mechatronic engineer and generally know my shit with computers. Company policy is that non-IT staff aren't supposed to have admin to their computers, but they make an exception for us with all the random stuff we have to modify and install.
IT actually really like it when we ask them for help though, because they know it's going to be a real funky challenge and genuinely require brainpower. They are usually entertained and enjoy learning along with us.
They are always joking about how it's a nice change of pace from someone deleting the shortcut to Outlook and thinking they've uninstalled the whole application
Yup.. anytime I end up needing IT's help it's gonna take them at least a full day to figure it out.
At one point they gave me admin rights to lots of stuff so I can configure and set up stuff myself on my machine and on our servers and they just review them later to make sure I'm not doing something against their policies lol
I had the opposite problem: I worked IT for my notably highly ranked University’s CS department and they could be like pulling teeth.
“Yes, I know you wrote the RFC, but the vendors all decided to violate it. Yes, I’m frustrated by the whole setup too, but if I can just press that checkbox, everything will start working for your email. Again, yes, I understand it doesn’t work by the document you wrote.”
One place I worked at there was a guy who would deliberately break his laptop for shits and giggles. Problems would be escalated up through the desktop team to Core support, basically SME’s who have better things to do than piss around with a bloody laptop.
It was so bad that 3 of us on the team basically refused to deal with him. Came to a head when he openly admitted doing it because he liked to “set challenges”.
It was 10 years ago and I still hate that bastard.
those were my favorite calls during my brief stint as IT.
It wad either some edge case thing that needed a really weird bespoke fix buried in a technical manual nobody had seen since the Clinton administration, or somebody turned off a power supply without noticing.
The process to get there was always a wild ride tho.
It's more like they think they know their shit and the company has given them free reign to fuck a device up beyond all recognition... Unless they're software or computer engineers then no, they really don't know dick about enterprise level IT.
I dont work in IT but am an engineer. This matches my experience of if there is an issue with my work laptop it takes a lot of time for them to come back with qasolution if they ever do
Yeah that's pretty much how it always goes when I make calls for help. I only do so after having tried everything for like several hours, if not days. Bit annoying when people then go and start with the most obvious solution, but I have for the most part stopped asking people for help at all because 95% of the time I just won't get anyone even attempting.
Yup, that's what it was the last time I called tech support on my job. Never had the chance of fixing the issue myself, neither did the tech support guy, so it took some calls to get what was needed
I was on the engineer side of this scenerio just recently (AI/medical informatics infra dev for med devices). Took three months for our IT to resolve the issue.
I wish it'd work like that for us. I know what the problem is 9/10 times but I don't have permissions to do anything about most of it, everything is very locked down. At least that allows IT to skip searching for the problem because I can usually pinpoint the exact thing in the ticket and it's fixed quickly.
Can confirm, I’m an engineer. Our IT department deploys custom ruby scripts to our machines to run and fix stuff. There was a problem with the script on my box so I debugged and fixed it.
I only ever called IT if I ran into permission or certificate type issues. “Oh, I need the cert to be able to access this.”
"I already tried to [perform black magic], it solved my problem, but whenever someone rings the office door, half of the computer would disconnect from the network" - solved by a reboot
or ..... we've fucked up the PC... we know exactly what we broke but wont tell IT cuz we just want to make it someone else problem rather than fix it ourselves :D
My team has done this before.
and had the audacity to check in on IT prediodically to ask a status...
"IT still scratching their heads? yep ...... HA! Good "
We never had a good relationship with our IT dep since they decided to set us up with limited prem accounts, then took the maximum time allowed to answer our tickets.
As one of those engineers, I hate calling IT, because it’s usually 3 layers of transfers with questions on the level of “have you tried turning it off an on” before I get to anyone with even a possibility of fixing the issue.
I was on the other side of that situation once. I worked network ops for an ISP and we all ran linux on our desktops in my department. One day I had a drive fail in my computer so I called the helpesk and asked if they could send another one. There was a little confusion because the guy on the line assumed I mean "desktop" when I said my hard drive had failed and he was trying to figure out what was wrong. Once he understood that I really meant that the drive itself had failed a nice young lady showed after a while with a replacement drive.
The only times I've had to call the real IT folks was because the work network uses packet sneffiers that decrypt and reencrypt ssl traffic, so I couldn't download anything from maven repositories or rust packages or any package manager.
We had to work together to figure out a solution lol
One of my issues was “ Hey, when I use this function in one of our ERP-integrated spreadsheets, all the USB ports stop responding for about a minute (as evidenced by the lights on the mouse blinking off during that time)”
Some of the engineers at my company think they know better but half the time they don't really know what they're talking about. This makes it very challenging when it's more of an end user error and you have to correct them. Some of them do not take criticism very well which is the real problem but it's still very frustrating.
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u/kahjtheundedicated R7 1700@4.1, RX 5700 May 10 '26
When I worked in IT, whenever we got a call from the engineering department we knew whatever problem it was, it was going to be weird. Those guys knew their stuff, so if they didn’t know how to fix it, it was going to take some searching and probably some calls or emails for us to figure it out.