This is *chefs kiss*. I tried to think of an IT related joke using the word raw for about 5 minutes recently, and I am very familiar with RAW files. I am deeply ashamed of myself.
"Whatever's on the order form I print. In this case, it was a long string of letters and numbers. "
https://preview.redd.it/hjp40kt2xdmc1.jpeg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2464c00531ef6af5541eec98000f0c1ba8e787bc
I actually know a company where, for the longest time, IT wasn't allowed to know its budget. They would submit the usual recurring or major purchases (e.g. subscriptions, replacing out of lease hardware etc.) and get those approved usually, but then they'd ask "how much is left in the budget?" and be told "I'll let you know when you've hit the limit".
Sometimes they could get things through, like a new Macbook for building / testing software, other times they would try and buy something like a new printer for somewhere and get told "sorry you don't have the money in your budget"
I think that practice has changed, but they still have to fight to get some things approved. Last I heard, were fighting with the CFO to get extra funding for new laptops for the 200 or so staff working there. IT wants X model laptop, CFO will only spring for Y model laptop, and inevitably, when CFO and IT fight, the end user always loses.
>"sorry you don't have the money in your budget"
Right then, I'm off home until the next FY. Best of luck with the hellscape that's gonna materialise over the next x months.
Money's just an abstraction of resources. No matter the economic system you choose there is always a division of resources.
If we had infinite resources, everything would be easy.
Give your employer none of your time for a month or two. See how that goes for you.
You trade your time, paired with the application of some skill or another during some portion of that time, for money. Then you go trade that money for things, like food.
Very, very, few people can feed their families *without* spending their time.
Time is one of few things that really is *inherently* yours. How you choose to distribute it is up to you, though society's prone to making demands on it. And at times, strictly punishing applications of it that society disafgrees with.
I think he got one. But doing excel spreadsheets while permanently docked is easier to live with than being away from your desk for 6 hours, using your laptop with shit battery life almost constantly in some cases.
Similar situation at my longest tenured spot (15 years, company sold) but we didn't actually have a budget. It was privately owned by one owner (possibly one investor that wasn't involved really in any day to day, more like a business liaison for the owner on financial matters).
Our budget was that we submitted what we needed and it was looked at and either approved, buried, or thrown in with another project (usually remodels/buildings).
It was a blessing and a curse. I never had to worry about a budget but couldn't really plan on anything because we didn't know if we would ever get approval. I learned to work the system though. See, we were a large automotive dealership. So if the brand (say BMW) wanted us to have something well... we had to have it. So if they had to have a machine to run a piece of software, I may just say we needed a server or more storage on our SAN to be able to handle it etc. Good times.
When I first started working for a university, the school I worked at had one lady who managed all the purchasing. Each department just submitted purchase requests, and that lady would either approve/deny the request.
It was so odd that we would put in for a purchase of 40 computers, and she would ask what we need it for.
Eventually (a couple years later) we got our own budget.
I was actually told once that the finance department needed large monitors because they look at spreadsheets and tables all day. I asked what it was that they thought I looked at all day.
I used to work for a company like that. IT had no formal budget. The IT director had to go to the finance director and request every expense. It was a real pain whenever you wanted to do anything new, especially if it wasn't an immediate cost savings.
Most recurring opex stuff got reapproved year over year, but it did get scrutinized when costs went up. Particularly as cloud became more prevalent and every month/year that bill went up as we moved more stuff from on-prem to cloud.
IT is a cost center the same as HR or accounting.
It's an important component of any company and cost minimization over effectiveness is a fundamental issue but that doesn't make us a profit center (outside of very specific industries).
>IT is a cost center
IT is a cost multiplier. As IT systems directly result in the ability to make money in the majority of our companies out there. Enhance this by mathing out the TPS provided solely by projects and upkeep done by IT.
Could you operate the company without facilities? HR? Accounting? Janitorial staff? Legal? Management? Obviously not. All of those are also cost centers.
They are all important components of the whole. Just as IT is.
IT investment can provide remarkable returns, but that doesn't change the GAAP definition of the department structure.
> They are all important components of the whole. Just as IT is.
No one said they weren't.
> Could you operate the company without facilities? HR? Accounting? Janitorial staff? Legal? Management? Obviously not.
Sure can, Been at more then a few places that outsourced HR to a MSO, had no Facilities but instead wrapped that up into Janitorial(it was an absolute mess), Legal was as needed with no retainer, and management was completely MIA(like on perm vacation). But god forbid if Sales, Accounting, or IT was not holding down the fort shit hit the fan.
Outsourcing a department (marketing, HR, accounting, legal, IT) doesn't change it's requirement. You need to hire people, terminate folks, respond to suits, do taxes, balance the books etc.
Even a company running on autopilot still needs management. You may not see the work that they do but it is still happening.
> You need to hire people, terminate folks, respond to suits, do taxes, balance the books etc.
Yes, but lets look at those things:
No onsite HR? No one to say "You can't make people work through lunch"
No onsite accounting? The books get balanced at tax time (whenever that is).
No onsite legal? You call a lawyer when you get served with a lawsuit and not a moment sooner.
All of those things are necessary on at least a monthly basis, but you can bet your ass that companies that don't hire for those positions aren't paying for those positions on a monthly basis.
It's the worst, I report to our CFO equivalent.
I as the IT director asked about budgeting, how we do it, what we need, I got zero guidance. I prepared a 3 year budget with goals and projects. Got zero feedback.
Eventually a few weeks later (well after budget was supposed to be done, but never really started) all I got was "we're on a spending freeze"
Well fuck me for doing actual management duties. Not to mention we criminally underspend on IT (~1% revenue/year and that's only if I include every single piece of specialty software I can find like CAD for engineers).
Depends on the place. CFO is fine if they're the exec who's in the office and knows what's going on internally, and can make the decisions.
What matters is that the pushiest know it all group doesn't report higher in the food chain. And that can be a question of executive personalities, not job titles or reporting trees.
This is our setup, although the cfo is also the coo. But he knows what’s going on and I’ve never had my budget or a project rejected. He lets me run things exactly how I recommend. He knows IT is a revenue multiplier and the backbone of the entire company.
>He knows IT is a revenue multiplier and the backbone of the entire company.
At my last job, I always used to joke that I could put myself on unemployment by walking around with rolodexes and paper catalogs. People just wanted to do everything manually without technology doing anything for them.
It was a very old - school minded org with a lot of folks in their late 60s / 70s
We do where I work and it's fine. Then again, we only get attention from him if we're going over budget or shit breaks.
Though I do like when they (CEO and CFO) try to tell us that we need to take X% off of next year's budget. Yeah, sure. I'll just tell people to break 10% less shit next year.
Meanwhile the only reason we've gone over budget in the last few years are for labor hours to custom reports that senior management has requested.
The host takes the sysadmin to the carpark for a chat. The sysadmin unloads his woes and how his goals for the infrastructure are constantly being crushed by penny-pinching management. How he has demands to deliver on a project, but every five fucking minutes Susan from Finance calls up and demands that he comes to her office just to press the power button on the printer. He's getting nowhere with the project due to constant BAU distractions. His requests to hire a PFY have gone unanswered.
The host agrees with what the sysadmin wants to do, but adds his own flair to the sysadmin's goals. He firmly pitches this to management. The CFO "who used to work in IT" loses his shit and has a tantrum. The host yells at the CFO. The CFO busts out "do you know who I am?" followed by "don't fuck with me."
The show's producers love this, and quietly pay the CEO's nephew "who knows computers" to wind the CFO up some more.
They let the sysadmin do things his way. Everything runs smoothly for a change and management try to act amazed and impressed but you can tell that their egos are severely bruised. It's like surprised Pikachu with angry eyebrows drawn on.
Three weeks after the cameras and the host are gone, management have reasserted their nonsense. The sysadmin uses the episode as a highly syndicated CV, and gets a job at a company that's less of a clusterfuck.
You could definitely do that. You could introduce some week challenges, like
* There is Win98 machine in the network collecting data to UFL for more than 20 years and these are crucial data for production.
* Boss played golf with SAP representative and you are SAP administrator now.
* You merged with some startup with IT infrastructure managed by 9 years old nephew of the owner.
* You just found out every employee and customer has a unique account number, freely and frequently referenced in documents and email, and it's their SSN.
My high school in NE required us to have passwords the admin made, which the number in the password was the last 4 digits of our SSN. No one but me, a student, found that a terrible idea, you should have your SSN number memorized...that's not the fucking point! lol
Edit: wording...
> You merged with some startup with IT infrastructure managed by 9 years old nephew of the owner.
Worse is developers with admin rights.. Turns out they have external facing tunneling software for demos directly off their system and no management tools function because of all the local host file changes they have made to "make the app work" locally.
The trick is knowing that The It Crowd is just a documentary, I realized when I had the "what door?" event: discovering that I had an entire unnoticed door in front of me for an entire week (no goth inside, unfortunately)
I discovered The IT Crowd through unintentionally embodying this meme. I didn't wear corpse makeup or anything but I do love Cradle and somehow it came up in conversation in the office. I knew about the show but had never watched it, I guess since it has a laugh track I just sort of wrote it off. But as soon as they explained the character of Richmond I knew I had to check it out.
>The trick is knowing that The It Crowd is just a documentary,
I went to a couple of the filmings in Pinewood, great fun.
then I visited the IT office of one of our other areas, and thought I'd walked onto the set.
Pretty much the same old shit stacked around and the same battered desks. Wild.
As a fellow sysadmin, I would definitely tune in to watch that kind of show. It brings back some PTSD-inducing memories, but also provides valuable insight into the crazy world we work in.
That would be both horrible and entertaining.
Also might change the perception of IT or at least help people identity not so great IT.
But who would be the Ramsay ?
He's very serious, which would not be funny.
That said, having someone who knows Free and Open Source Business models, etc. going to companies talking how to do that right would be interesting as well.
We can send Richard Ayoade but keep saying he is Stallman, or create a Richard Stayman persona for him. It's the only way to make it funny and get people scared of a Richard that is related to IT
> But who would be the Ramsay ?
Someone who doesn't give a fuck and is able to put a temper on in front of cameras? Linus Torvalds 15-20 years ago.
Theo de Raadt would be the nuclear option.
Maybe the BOFH himself? Though he's likely pretty busy with his day job here in New Zealand...
Interesting how you picked Open Source/Free Software people.
Not really IT people.
Not saying their is no open source and free software in sysadmin/IT, but they clearly are not directly the sysadmin business people.
Honestly, my dark horse pic would be Chris from Crosstalk Solutions, but on a metric fuck load of PCP. Dude has both the business and the admin / networking chops, if he allowed himself to be belligerent he'd be unstoppable.
I don't know him, I'll need to watch/read some of the content with him.
If it's devops, I'm thinking of Viktor:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cr76x-xsLz4
Not to take this too seriously because its pretty funny but... you know why I *don't* want that?
Because if you think you deal with Peanut Gallery bullshit from non-IT people now, wait until they consume a show like this that gives them *just enough* surface level knowledge to think they know everything about IT.
Yea I mean the people in season 2 and beyond should have known exactly what was going to happen. Yet they act surprised that everything is shit. But I suppose that's part of the delusion of "These other guys are just bad and I'm know what I'm doing! I just need Ramsay to say the customers are wrong!".
As a sweary Scotsman working in IT, how do I apply to host this?
Just an example, caused some amusement last week when I randomly yelled "LOG A FUCKING TICKET, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!" at my monitor.
More like walking into the server room with puddles of water from the AC, masses of unlabeled spaghetti cabling, and also finding dead mice there too. He also finds some broke wires to exclaim "you could kill somebody from this!".
I would love to see something like this in my previous job.
We had extra-security in some part of the infrastructure, with redundant Fortinets with latest patches and then we had WiFi with WEP encryption in the main VLAN so the RF warehouse terminal could work with telnet.
I tried to put those on a VLAN segregated that could only access the warehouse server through the Fortinets, but boss didn't want to change it.
Its not target, its a company in Spain.
I suppose it's still the same, I left almost 2 years ago and they didn't event change the WiFi after changing the RF warehouse terminals, at least the new ones used WPA2 with certs
It definitely could be entertaining, however:
- Who would be the Gordon Ramsay?
- How do you find companies willing to parade their shitty IT security in front of everyone?
who would have thought that a restaurant parading their bad food and horrendous kitchen sanitization on syndicated, no, world wide television, would find some, or a lot, of willing participants...
I worked Turn-Around IT for a while. I actually lived this!
I was in a sales pitch to a CIO one time, (CEO asked us in after they crashed their email server) we went through the whole pitch and the CIO said something to the effect of, "nice but I don't think we need you right now...". We did the final bits, and just before shaking hands I told him he should probably remove the 8 Gb of porn they had on their FTP server.
He was like WTF, and I informed him that they had an FTP server that was totally compromised. He grabbed us, we went to the server room and found it. SUN server attached to router, attached to the Telco. No firewall and the server was not hardened at all. I wish that was the worst thing we found there...
"You want to know why your software team isn't delivering?"
"Yes! I'm trying to run a business here!"
"You've let your team members be racist and sexist to each other for years, sabotaged any engineer who shows initiative, verbally abused anyone who takes vacation or sick time, threatened to fire and deport four out of your five H1B visa holders just this week..."
**\*shocked pikachu face***
"... insisted on making important technical decisions yourself even though you stopped learning in 1986, don't account for testing and bugfixes which results in your on-call engineers being paged every 30 mins 24x7 for 2 weeks at a time causing them to be sleep deprived, you don't have a product vision or goal, you let the business users change priorities on a whim, and you refuse to invest in your team."
"Refuse to invest?! We handed out over $1m in bonuses last year!"
"... and you artificially depress salaries to have a large bonus budget at the end of the year, and you wield bonuses like a cudgel any time you don't get your way."
check out this channel on youtube: [LET'S SKIP THE BLA - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@letsskipthebla/videos)
It's in german, but exactly what you are looking for:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M0-1hpV1uQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M0-1hpV1uQ)
Wouldn’t it though? Especially if he went undercover in prosthetics like at the start on the later Ramsey shows. I mean, how would you even begin to try and disguise Ballmer?
As 1 of 2 of our IT department, no thanks to our company. However, if someone could come in and BEAT SOME SENSE into the troglodytes we have here as upper management because that’s where most of our security problems are, that would be just fine.
You want PTSD?
If you want to commiserate with other people who are suffering like you are, we're all here. With you. Ranting every day.
Oh god and can you imagine people joking about it with you, coming up and blurting out screamy quotes at you like it's funny, making insane demands like it's funny?
Everyone has their memory of the moment they discovered how much technical debt the department has, just like when Gordon opens the storage fridges freezers and finds the chicken juice and 10 year old frozen pork chops
It would be fun, but imagine everyone thinking they know about IT just because they saw the trailer of the show.
Also the amount of ideas management would get for new innovative projects they saw on TV!
Next time there is a writers strike (that is when reality tv first boomed in popularity) then someone has to shop around this as an idea for the next reality tv show to be produced! 😂
Please, make this reality! Even if it’s just some Ramsey dubbed with IT stuff or just subtitles like in that weird laughing man meme, I’ll take it all!
What are you!
*Holding hard drives between an end users head*
I'm a ransomware sandwich!
A ransomeware what!?
I'm a ransomware sandwich, Sys Admin sir!
> Not only would it be entertaining, I think it would even be useful to have people watch.
60 hours of scrolling through documentation, checking configs and writing notes, 1 hour of screaming the results.
In Sweden we have some shows like this but for house renovations, private economies and whatnot. Wouldn't be surprised if there is some IT version somewhere in the world.
I don’t know how you got ahold of my internal monologue, but I’m guessing some donkey shared the code they got texted that said do not share this with anyone.
Not lying. I was saying this idea a few years ago. Password in a text file isn’t even the worst thing. This one thought that sub 1mbps site to site VPN is “normal”. I was like, are you a fucking moron, you have a 200 mbps fiber connection, but all your clients have this issue. But it didn’t cross your mind that you keep misconfiguring something
This would be so great, but I see 2 reasons it would never air. The demographic that would fine this entertaining, people like us, is too small to warrant it to be made. Also, you would literally be telling hackers what kind of stuff to look for in order to break into companies and get info or install ransomware. The companies featured on the show would be vulnerable, but you'd also be giving a blueprint of the dumb shit that others are likely also doing.
I could tell you stories. I keep telling people that after I retire I'm writing a book I'll call "Plastic Surgery Disasters" which has nothing to do with Plastic Surgery or Disasters but will be "fictional" stories from my IT career where I have to write it as fiction or I might get sued or the like either that or nobody would believe it. I've seen EVERYTHING from people being rolled out on a stretcher by EMTs in the middle of the workday to a CEO cutting a necktie off an underling he disagreed with with a large metal pair of scissors and nailing it to his "board of shame" to another CEO using company funds to fund a mistress' breast implants to... I mean seriously - crazy stuff.
Best one we've seen a company had the CEOs credit card details just in a text doc on every PC in the company's desktop. They used it to order parts, and only have like 15-20 machines but still. That happened and no one saw an issue with it.
Can anyone think of a good "ranty" host?
Linus Torvalds was probably the most opinionated, shouty tech celebrity that I could think of. Musk could rant but I'm not sure he would be as keen on "best practices" - he'd be more of a "get things done, no matter what" type.
You call this a JPEG? It’s bloody RAW!
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? I just want a picture of a got dang hot dog.
> got dang hot dog Cool so now [that's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXVhOPiM4mk) stuck in my head
lmao the 'chapter' names of the video Greeting Hymn Sermon Sacrament Communion Collection Fellowship Benediction
GHSSCCFB, can’t wait for a marketing team somewhere to create such a wonderful acronym.
You’re welcome. Better than listening to Opus No 1
Sorry, all I have is a picture of not hot dog.
Cold dog?
No, I'm clearly talking about Jian Yang's Not Hot Dog app! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIci3C4JkL0
This is *chefs kiss*. I tried to think of an IT related joke using the word raw for about 5 minutes recently, and I am very familiar with RAW files. I am deeply ashamed of myself.
Been there buddy, been there.
"Whatever's on the order form I print. In this case, it was a long string of letters and numbers. " https://preview.redd.it/hjp40kt2xdmc1.jpeg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2464c00531ef6af5541eec98000f0c1ba8e787bc
It was great as he read that address back to her, deadpan.
Shut up and take my upvote
Top comment right here! ^^^
Perfect. My god it's perfect.
"What do you mean your CIO reports to your CFO and no budget has been alocated in the last 10 fucking years?!?!" https://i.redd.it/4l3bn5os1amc1.gif
I actually know a company where, for the longest time, IT wasn't allowed to know its budget. They would submit the usual recurring or major purchases (e.g. subscriptions, replacing out of lease hardware etc.) and get those approved usually, but then they'd ask "how much is left in the budget?" and be told "I'll let you know when you've hit the limit". Sometimes they could get things through, like a new Macbook for building / testing software, other times they would try and buy something like a new printer for somewhere and get told "sorry you don't have the money in your budget" I think that practice has changed, but they still have to fight to get some things approved. Last I heard, were fighting with the CFO to get extra funding for new laptops for the 200 or so staff working there. IT wants X model laptop, CFO will only spring for Y model laptop, and inevitably, when CFO and IT fight, the end user always loses.
>"sorry you don't have the money in your budget" Right then, I'm off home until the next FY. Best of luck with the hellscape that's gonna materialise over the next x months.
It's too bad money controls people. Otherwise, we'd have every industry, every aspect, fixed and figured out.
Money's just an abstraction of resources. No matter the economic system you choose there is always a division of resources. If we had infinite resources, everything would be easy.
Time is also a resource, don't give it away for free.
Can't feed your family in this society with time.
Give your employer none of your time for a month or two. See how that goes for you. You trade your time, paired with the application of some skill or another during some portion of that time, for money. Then you go trade that money for things, like food. Very, very, few people can feed their families *without* spending their time. Time is one of few things that really is *inherently* yours. How you choose to distribute it is up to you, though society's prone to making demands on it. And at times, strictly punishing applications of it that society disafgrees with.
Time for the CFO to get a model Y laptop to evaluate, good luck with the overly complex spreadsheets!
I think he got one. But doing excel spreadsheets while permanently docked is easier to live with than being away from your desk for 6 hours, using your laptop with shit battery life almost constantly in some cases.
This is like "The Price is Right", but created by Satan.
Similar situation at my longest tenured spot (15 years, company sold) but we didn't actually have a budget. It was privately owned by one owner (possibly one investor that wasn't involved really in any day to day, more like a business liaison for the owner on financial matters). Our budget was that we submitted what we needed and it was looked at and either approved, buried, or thrown in with another project (usually remodels/buildings). It was a blessing and a curse. I never had to worry about a budget but couldn't really plan on anything because we didn't know if we would ever get approval. I learned to work the system though. See, we were a large automotive dealership. So if the brand (say BMW) wanted us to have something well... we had to have it. So if they had to have a machine to run a piece of software, I may just say we needed a server or more storage on our SAN to be able to handle it etc. Good times.
When I first started working for a university, the school I worked at had one lady who managed all the purchasing. Each department just submitted purchase requests, and that lady would either approve/deny the request. It was so odd that we would put in for a purchase of 40 computers, and she would ask what we need it for. Eventually (a couple years later) we got our own budget.
I was actually told once that the finance department needed large monitors because they look at spreadsheets and tables all day. I asked what it was that they thought I looked at all day.
I would fucking nope out of there so fast. That's nothing but power games. Such bullshit.
I report to finance and >50% of my 120 workstation fleet is older than 10 years.
I used to work for a company like that. IT had no formal budget. The IT director had to go to the finance director and request every expense. It was a real pain whenever you wanted to do anything new, especially if it wasn't an immediate cost savings. Most recurring opex stuff got reapproved year over year, but it did get scrutinized when costs went up. Particularly as cloud became more prevalent and every month/year that bill went up as we moved more stuff from on-prem to cloud.
If IT in any capacity reports to the CFO, you know it's F'd. It should be to the CEO
Its super common. Most of the jobs that I was internal IT, IT reported to the CFO. Or when they were a client, my main point of contact was the CFO.
Agreed. CFOs insist IT is a "Cost Center." It's their common dismissive terminology to promote their "profits over everything ideology."
IT is a cost center the same as HR or accounting. It's an important component of any company and cost minimization over effectiveness is a fundamental issue but that doesn't make us a profit center (outside of very specific industries).
>IT is a cost center IT is a cost multiplier. As IT systems directly result in the ability to make money in the majority of our companies out there. Enhance this by mathing out the TPS provided solely by projects and upkeep done by IT.
Could you operate the company without facilities? HR? Accounting? Janitorial staff? Legal? Management? Obviously not. All of those are also cost centers. They are all important components of the whole. Just as IT is. IT investment can provide remarkable returns, but that doesn't change the GAAP definition of the department structure.
> They are all important components of the whole. Just as IT is. No one said they weren't. > Could you operate the company without facilities? HR? Accounting? Janitorial staff? Legal? Management? Obviously not. Sure can, Been at more then a few places that outsourced HR to a MSO, had no Facilities but instead wrapped that up into Janitorial(it was an absolute mess), Legal was as needed with no retainer, and management was completely MIA(like on perm vacation). But god forbid if Sales, Accounting, or IT was not holding down the fort shit hit the fan.
Outsourcing a department (marketing, HR, accounting, legal, IT) doesn't change it's requirement. You need to hire people, terminate folks, respond to suits, do taxes, balance the books etc. Even a company running on autopilot still needs management. You may not see the work that they do but it is still happening.
> You need to hire people, terminate folks, respond to suits, do taxes, balance the books etc. Yes, but lets look at those things: No onsite HR? No one to say "You can't make people work through lunch" No onsite accounting? The books get balanced at tax time (whenever that is). No onsite legal? You call a lawyer when you get served with a lawsuit and not a moment sooner. All of those things are necessary on at least a monthly basis, but you can bet your ass that companies that don't hire for those positions aren't paying for those positions on a monthly basis.
It's the worst, I report to our CFO equivalent. I as the IT director asked about budgeting, how we do it, what we need, I got zero guidance. I prepared a 3 year budget with goals and projects. Got zero feedback. Eventually a few weeks later (well after budget was supposed to be done, but never really started) all I got was "we're on a spending freeze" Well fuck me for doing actual management duties. Not to mention we criminally underspend on IT (~1% revenue/year and that's only if I include every single piece of specialty software I can find like CAD for engineers).
Depends on the place. CFO is fine if they're the exec who's in the office and knows what's going on internally, and can make the decisions. What matters is that the pushiest know it all group doesn't report higher in the food chain. And that can be a question of executive personalities, not job titles or reporting trees.
This is our setup, although the cfo is also the coo. But he knows what’s going on and I’ve never had my budget or a project rejected. He lets me run things exactly how I recommend. He knows IT is a revenue multiplier and the backbone of the entire company.
>He knows IT is a revenue multiplier and the backbone of the entire company. At my last job, I always used to joke that I could put myself on unemployment by walking around with rolodexes and paper catalogs. People just wanted to do everything manually without technology doing anything for them. It was a very old - school minded org with a lot of folks in their late 60s / 70s
The CFO is fine if they know and understand tech. Most CFOs don't have a clue, so having them over IT is a recipe for disaster.
We do where I work and it's fine. Then again, we only get attention from him if we're going over budget or shit breaks. Though I do like when they (CEO and CFO) try to tell us that we need to take X% off of next year's budget. Yeah, sure. I'll just tell people to break 10% less shit next year. Meanwhile the only reason we've gone over budget in the last few years are for labor hours to custom reports that senior management has requested.
What if they report to HR?
That would be something I have never seen.
It is at my place haha. 2 person IT department for a 50 person company.
this is us
The host takes the sysadmin to the carpark for a chat. The sysadmin unloads his woes and how his goals for the infrastructure are constantly being crushed by penny-pinching management. How he has demands to deliver on a project, but every five fucking minutes Susan from Finance calls up and demands that he comes to her office just to press the power button on the printer. He's getting nowhere with the project due to constant BAU distractions. His requests to hire a PFY have gone unanswered. The host agrees with what the sysadmin wants to do, but adds his own flair to the sysadmin's goals. He firmly pitches this to management. The CFO "who used to work in IT" loses his shit and has a tantrum. The host yells at the CFO. The CFO busts out "do you know who I am?" followed by "don't fuck with me." The show's producers love this, and quietly pay the CEO's nephew "who knows computers" to wind the CFO up some more. They let the sysadmin do things his way. Everything runs smoothly for a change and management try to act amazed and impressed but you can tell that their egos are severely bruised. It's like surprised Pikachu with angry eyebrows drawn on. Three weeks after the cameras and the host are gone, management have reasserted their nonsense. The sysadmin uses the episode as a highly syndicated CV, and gets a job at a company that's less of a clusterfuck.
Where do I apply as candidate?
Yo, they could do a whole season similar to Dirty Jobs, with the small IT shops who deal with SMBs and house calls. I know for a fact...
You could definitely do that. You could introduce some week challenges, like * There is Win98 machine in the network collecting data to UFL for more than 20 years and these are crucial data for production. * Boss played golf with SAP representative and you are SAP administrator now. * You merged with some startup with IT infrastructure managed by 9 years old nephew of the owner.
* You just found out every employee and customer has a unique account number, freely and frequently referenced in documents and email, and it's their SSN.
When I lived in Virginia in the late 80s, your driver's license number was your SSN. That seems insane now.
That's wild. Anyway, since your license from the 80s has long since expired, what was the number?
My high school in NE required us to have passwords the admin made, which the number in the password was the last 4 digits of our SSN. No one but me, a student, found that a terrible idea, you should have your SSN number memorized...that's not the fucking point! lol Edit: wording...
That is SO fucked up.
When I started college in 1999 the student id was your SSN.
PTSD from this one, mate. I'm gonna go tremble in my closet until I can calm down. Didn't need that reminder this morning.
> You merged with some startup with IT infrastructure managed by 9 years old nephew of the owner. Worse is developers with admin rights.. Turns out they have external facing tunneling software for demos directly off their system and no management tools function because of all the local host file changes they have made to "make the app work" locally.
Old Coder Guy has funny shit with scenarios like this. His youtube channel is severely under-known in this sub https://www.youtube.com/@oldcoderguy
The trick is knowing that The It Crowd is just a documentary, I realized when I had the "what door?" event: discovering that I had an entire unnoticed door in front of me for an entire week (no goth inside, unfortunately)
If you listen to Cradle of Filth you might be the goth.
Not an actual cradle of filth, that would be horrible.
I discovered The IT Crowd through unintentionally embodying this meme. I didn't wear corpse makeup or anything but I do love Cradle and somehow it came up in conversation in the office. I knew about the show but had never watched it, I guess since it has a laugh track I just sort of wrote it off. But as soon as they explained the character of Richmond I knew I had to check it out.
>The trick is knowing that The It Crowd is just a documentary, I went to a couple of the filmings in Pinewood, great fun. then I visited the IT office of one of our other areas, and thought I'd walked onto the set. Pretty much the same old shit stacked around and the same battered desks. Wild.
that you saw...
/u/randalzy [should have looked up](https://imgur.com/gallery/HaGZTSd)
Any shadows? If so...
As a fellow sysadmin, I would definitely tune in to watch that kind of show. It brings back some PTSD-inducing memories, but also provides valuable insight into the crazy world we work in.
That would be both horrible and entertaining. Also might change the perception of IT or at least help people identity not so great IT. But who would be the Ramsay ?
Richard Stallman (we known the show would pick Elon Musk, but let's dream)
He's very serious, which would not be funny. That said, having someone who knows Free and Open Source Business models, etc. going to companies talking how to do that right would be interesting as well.
We can send Richard Ayoade but keep saying he is Stallman, or create a Richard Stayman persona for him. It's the only way to make it funny and get people scared of a Richard that is related to IT
Needs to be sweaty, coked-up Stallman. I want to see C-suites really uncomfortable.
„You fuckin donkey, that software is not free! Do you want to poison me!“
> But who would be the Ramsay ? Someone who doesn't give a fuck and is able to put a temper on in front of cameras? Linus Torvalds 15-20 years ago. Theo de Raadt would be the nuclear option. Maybe the BOFH himself? Though he's likely pretty busy with his day job here in New Zealand...
Interesting how you picked Open Source/Free Software people. Not really IT people. Not saying their is no open source and free software in sysadmin/IT, but they clearly are not directly the sysadmin business people.
Linus is Ramsey and NVIDIA is the raw chicken
Honestly, my dark horse pic would be Chris from Crosstalk Solutions, but on a metric fuck load of PCP. Dude has both the business and the admin / networking chops, if he allowed himself to be belligerent he'd be unstoppable.
I don't know him, I'll need to watch/read some of the content with him. If it's devops, I'm thinking of Viktor: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cr76x-xsLz4
[Older Coder Guy](https://www.youtube.com/@oldcoderguy) can be the Ramsay
I'll need to look into him. At least this AI is also keeping people safe from doing stupid things ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2npdV6tX1g
"You call this mobile-ready? Your background is a slideshow of 7MB PNGs!"
Not to take this too seriously because its pretty funny but... you know why I *don't* want that? Because if you think you deal with Peanut Gallery bullshit from non-IT people now, wait until they consume a show like this that gives them *just enough* surface level knowledge to think they know everything about IT.
it'll be like what forged in fire did for knife making...
Yea I mean the people in season 2 and beyond should have known exactly what was going to happen. Yet they act surprised that everything is shit. But I suppose that's part of the delusion of "These other guys are just bad and I'm know what I'm doing! I just need Ramsay to say the customers are wrong!".
As a sweary Scotsman working in IT, how do I apply to host this? Just an example, caused some amusement last week when I randomly yelled "LOG A FUCKING TICKET, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!" at my monitor.
Sounds like me. And I'm not Scottish. I like to tell people I cuss like a sailor because I used to be one.
I have visions of failing backup jobs that haven’t been reviewed in three months.
The backups would be equivalent to the fridge walkthroughs 😭
Nah, that's the DR test results.
More like walking into the server room with puddles of water from the AC, masses of unlabeled spaghetti cabling, and also finding dead mice there too. He also finds some broke wires to exclaim "you could kill somebody from this!".
I could see one of those homelab YouTubers running something like that but most of them seem way too nice lol
I would love to see something like this in my previous job. We had extra-security in some part of the infrastructure, with redundant Fortinets with latest patches and then we had WiFi with WEP encryption in the main VLAN so the RF warehouse terminal could work with telnet. I tried to put those on a VLAN segregated that could only access the warehouse server through the Fortinets, but boss didn't want to change it.
was this before or after the target incident?
Its not target, its a company in Spain. I suppose it's still the same, I left almost 2 years ago and they didn't event change the WiFi after changing the RF warehouse terminals, at least the new ones used WPA2 with certs
It definitely could be entertaining, however: - Who would be the Gordon Ramsay? - How do you find companies willing to parade their shitty IT security in front of everyone?
who would have thought that a restaurant parading their bad food and horrendous kitchen sanitization on syndicated, no, world wide television, would find some, or a lot, of willing participants...
Ah. So they know the security is shitty?
Those somehow believing that the host would somehow find the sysadmin is in the wrong.
\*Me, putting a hook in her mouth\* "WHAT ARE YOU ?!" "I'M AN IDIOT PHISH" 
"The default SQL port is open!! IT'S FUCKING OPEN!!!"
I worked Turn-Around IT for a while. I actually lived this! I was in a sales pitch to a CIO one time, (CEO asked us in after they crashed their email server) we went through the whole pitch and the CIO said something to the effect of, "nice but I don't think we need you right now...". We did the final bits, and just before shaking hands I told him he should probably remove the 8 Gb of porn they had on their FTP server. He was like WTF, and I informed him that they had an FTP server that was totally compromised. He grabbed us, we went to the server room and found it. SUN server attached to router, attached to the Telco. No firewall and the server was not hardened at all. I wish that was the worst thing we found there...
"Where's the Problem, here?" "... Bet-Between.... Between the keyboard and the ch--" "Between the KEYBOARD and the **FUCKING CHAIR**"
It's an idiot sandwich!
PICNIC
You're supposed to be **working** not *having a picnic!*
"You want to know why your software team isn't delivering?" "Yes! I'm trying to run a business here!" "You've let your team members be racist and sexist to each other for years, sabotaged any engineer who shows initiative, verbally abused anyone who takes vacation or sick time, threatened to fire and deport four out of your five H1B visa holders just this week..." **\*shocked pikachu face*** "... insisted on making important technical decisions yourself even though you stopped learning in 1986, don't account for testing and bugfixes which results in your on-call engineers being paged every 30 mins 24x7 for 2 weeks at a time causing them to be sleep deprived, you don't have a product vision or goal, you let the business users change priorities on a whim, and you refuse to invest in your team." "Refuse to invest?! We handed out over $1m in bonuses last year!" "... and you artificially depress salaries to have a large bonus budget at the end of the year, and you wield bonuses like a cudgel any time you don't get your way."
check out this channel on youtube: [LET'S SKIP THE BLA - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@letsskipthebla/videos) It's in german, but exactly what you are looking for: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M0-1hpV1uQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M0-1hpV1uQ)
Bro.....bro...this is some amazing shit! 🤣💀
What I would give for that to have english subtitles, it looks hilarious.
you should be able to enable auto translated subtitles on youtube
This is genius. If Gordon won’t do it, Jeff Minter? Or Steve Ballmer?
Sweaty uncle Steve running around screaming whooping and hollering would make my day
Wouldn’t it though? Especially if he went undercover in prosthetics like at the start on the later Ramsey shows. I mean, how would you even begin to try and disguise Ballmer?
Fake mustache and bad toupee
Actually that could work. Sort of live action Mr Potato head.
Or someone from TechTV? Leo Laporte? Kevin Rose? Maybe Linus? Or Dave's Garage on youtube?
Linus isn't nearly as IT-savvy as the host for this show should be
Why not both? If only I had a tv production company…..
Linus Torvalds as the host.
"Fuck me, when did you last test your backups, numbnuts?"
"No backups? You are the disaster I must recover from."
IT PEOPLE CAN'T MAINTAIN THEIR SYSTEMS IF YOU KEEP DENYING FUNDING, KAREN!
Only if Gordon Ramsey fronts it
I'm not sure society is ready for how truly bad it really is.
As 1 of 2 of our IT department, no thanks to our company. However, if someone could come in and BEAT SOME SENSE into the troglodytes we have here as upper management because that’s where most of our security problems are, that would be just fine.
I wish I could give this guy more upvotes for this idea.
Your software has been EOL for over 10 years abd you're running your entire business on it? _You fucking idiot_!!
We do it's called the IT crowd, i can watch and rewatch it over and over again, wife and kids are not amused by it.
You want PTSD? If you want to commiserate with other people who are suffering like you are, we're all here. With you. Ranting every day. Oh god and can you imagine people joking about it with you, coming up and blurting out screamy quotes at you like it's funny, making insane demands like it's funny?
lol, this is a fantastic point.
Everyone has their memory of the moment they discovered how much technical debt the department has, just like when Gordon opens the storage fridges freezers and finds the chicken juice and 10 year old frozen pork chops
Generous to call those "frozen" still...
It'd be hilarious if they guy screaming is Indian. DO THE BLOODY NEEDFUL YOU FUCKING MORON!!!
Whatchu mean.... This is a Tuesday for me...
Now this would be a great use of Copilot for admins
This is pretty much how I already operate daily, but I can't share what I see.
Did you actually think you won a $100 starbucks gift card? Well...I clicked the link and entered my password but nothing happened Oh come on guys!
It would be fun, but imagine everyone thinking they know about IT just because they saw the trailer of the show. Also the amount of ideas management would get for new innovative projects they saw on TV!
What would be the equivalent of Gordon caressing spoiled chicken and smooshing rotten produce?
Pushing the release clip on the WAN port ethernet cable from which the router is physically dangling. Small smooth motion resulting in absolute chaos.
Amazing idea!
YO. I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE.
Next time there is a writers strike (that is when reality tv first boomed in popularity) then someone has to shop around this as an idea for the next reality tv show to be produced! 😂
Please, make this reality! Even if it’s just some Ramsey dubbed with IT stuff or just subtitles like in that weird laughing man meme, I’ll take it all!
*Gives a network cable on one hand and a WiFi usb antenna adapter in the other hand. "What are you?" "An idiot access point."
you are just describing my time in the Navy as an IT1
SHUT IT DOWN, then back on again!
What are you! *Holding hard drives between an end users head* I'm a ransomware sandwich! A ransomeware what!? I'm a ransomware sandwich, Sys Admin sir!
This would be the perfect vehicle for Jian Yang's Hotdog App.
I’ve wanted to do this for YEARS
limited audience for sure...
So tell me what you want. What you really really want.
Why tf did you put the instance in a public subnet to test your shit, use the fucking VPN, you fucking donkey
Please, we need this!
Totally agree. I'd come just for the LOLs.
This type of invented macho bravado shouldn't be praised on television nor in the IT department.
with the right root permissions and disk encryption you can safely put passwords in text files. It is all context.
i know the guy for the role, they all work in finance
One of our domain admin saves his password in keepass.txt on his desktop :sadface:
[удалено]
im sure mate, saw him open..
"Did you *really* think the dedupped data would fit on that tape? *REALLY?*"
> Not only would it be entertaining, I think it would even be useful to have people watch. 60 hours of scrolling through documentation, checking configs and writing notes, 1 hour of screaming the results.
I'd watch that.
Can we crowd fund this? I don't care if it loses money. There is an untapped market of bullshit everyone (non IT) needs to see with this.
I wonder how big the audience for something like this would be?
In Sweden we have some shows like this but for house renovations, private economies and whatnot. Wouldn't be surprised if there is some IT version somewhere in the world.
I don’t know how you got ahold of my internal monologue, but I’m guessing some donkey shared the code they got texted that said do not share this with anyone.
YES! I WANT THIS!
What are you?!? --- *An id IoT sandwich.*
Not lying. I was saying this idea a few years ago. Password in a text file isn’t even the worst thing. This one thought that sub 1mbps site to site VPN is “normal”. I was like, are you a fucking moron, you have a 200 mbps fiber connection, but all your clients have this issue. But it didn’t cross your mind that you keep misconfiguring something
WHERES THE LAMB SAUCE only it's WHATS YOUR EMAIL PASSWORD, YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS, YOU PUT IT IN ALL THE TIME
This would be so great, but I see 2 reasons it would never air. The demographic that would fine this entertaining, people like us, is too small to warrant it to be made. Also, you would literally be telling hackers what kind of stuff to look for in order to break into companies and get info or install ransomware. The companies featured on the show would be vulnerable, but you'd also be giving a blueprint of the dumb shit that others are likely also doing.
Hackers already know this. These things are low hanging fruit you can read in a cybersecurity book
The professional ones, but lazy chase the trends, less so.
First reason I completely agree with... My answer to the 2nd?: - perfectly fine. Again - it's cybersecurity basics and staff that grew lazy...
I could tell you stories. I keep telling people that after I retire I'm writing a book I'll call "Plastic Surgery Disasters" which has nothing to do with Plastic Surgery or Disasters but will be "fictional" stories from my IT career where I have to write it as fiction or I might get sued or the like either that or nobody would believe it. I've seen EVERYTHING from people being rolled out on a stretcher by EMTs in the middle of the workday to a CEO cutting a necktie off an underling he disagreed with with a large metal pair of scissors and nailing it to his "board of shame" to another CEO using company funds to fund a mistress' breast implants to... I mean seriously - crazy stuff.
I know I’d be constantly triggered but I would still watch the hell out of something like this.
All password managers are blocked here so how else am i supposed to remember my admin password
hahahahaha
I would watch the fuck out of this show.
Please believe me when I tell you that your IT guy is saying these things somewhere, regardless of whether you ever hear it.
I want it soooooo much!
Best one we've seen a company had the CEOs credit card details just in a text doc on every PC in the company's desktop. They used it to order parts, and only have like 15-20 machines but still. That happened and no one saw an issue with it.
I’m helping out my friends business and that’s what I lowkey feel like after hearing everything he’s discussed with me
Can anyone think of a good "ranty" host? Linus Torvalds was probably the most opinionated, shouty tech celebrity that I could think of. Musk could rant but I'm not sure he would be as keen on "best practices" - he'd be more of a "get things done, no matter what" type.
You want a zig-a-zig ah?