Some millionaire in my office: “Hey, Sanctus, what’s my password for my computer again?”
Me, who can barely afford to fix my car: fights the urge to use a letter opener as a weapon
Depends, if you treat the individual letters sure but if you look at the words as the atom of information most password crackers wouldn’t take long.
Those do make good passwords though. Had a company switch from 10 characters including special, caps, numbers lower upper requirements to 15+ with no requirements because it still would end up being harder to crack. Started using phrases where you could even put spaces, but in all lower case for me if was much quicker to type
Tangerine$45 is much harder for me to type than whatthefuckamidoinghere
I think it’s because I have to pause to think shift 4, then hit 4 and remember if my fingers are still by the 4.
All just examples but the standard keys… Are all automatic for me because of use.
I don’t blame anyone for forgetting their password—it’s a dumb system, having to memorize 100 separate 16-digit randomly generated base64 codes that change once a month. However, I do blame them for not using a password manager, and I do blame them for making their problems other people’s problems.
Ours isn’t like that at all. They dont even have to change it every three months. The insecurity is crazy here and they still can’t remember the same password they’ve had since before I started working here.
Forcing password changes too frequently is actually a security risk, as it encourages bad practices like re-use, iteration, keyboard walks and writing the passwords down.
There are reasonable limits to impose on this, and educating users with demonstrations such as haveibeenpwned have been highly effective in my experience.
However, I do blame them for not using a password manager
Managing the passwords in your password manager becomes a job in and of itself when you’ve got enough of them floating around. My office is on year two of trying to do automatic password rotation for the myriad of service accounts in our systems. Anything that’s not Active Directory integrates is a headache. And even the ones that are have to constantly stay ahead of the Microsoft Updates curve or run into security problems of all sorts.
It would be cool if everything could be SSO, but you need to have a certain amount of faith in your OS to accomplish that.
I work in IT. I usually call my job “IT support” but I’m also technically the system admin, and network admin.
Today, I had someone ask me to delete a calendar for them in Outlook. It wasn’t a shared or special calendar, it was literally just a calendar in their normal outlook.
Bear in mind, they didn’t ask how to do it. They asked me to do it.
That’s a skill issue right there. I’m not in the business of doing other people’s work for them. Now and then I’ll entertain the odd request of “how do I do x” and show someone how to get something done, mainly because it’s a lot less effort than telling them that I didn’t go to university for teaching, and all the ensuing arguments thereafter, because there’s always arguments.
But this was straight up “do my job for me”.
Lol, no, I have my own shit to do.
At a previous company, we would tag tickets in Zendesk based on the type of question it was so at the end of the year we could see which categories could use more explanation in our documentation. One of the category types was “LMGTFY”
The number of people who think that IT is supposed to know how to use every program and fix everything within those programs is a lot. I’ve had several engineers, programmers, designers, accountants, executives of who knows what consistently ask to fix their work or how to do whatever it is. I always try to point them in the right direction or help but other people in my field hate even that because it sets a precedent that the next time they need help they think they can ask again.
If I knew all of their jobs thoroughly like they seem to think, I wouldn’t be getting paid half what they are. I would need to be paid twice what they are, to support all of those positions in that way.
I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Yeah, Outlook has a lot of little things that throw people. Just getting people to find the view settings they want is tough sometimes, and font size in outlook doesn’t change with the character size of the OS being changed. Automatically disabling com add-ons that are supposed to not disable by group policy do to “slow start times” of outlook. Online calendars are a mess, sync issues, filter issues, spam issues, the spam blockers within the admin console of o365. Convincing people to get rid of .pst files. .pst files not being compatible with onedrive, importing .pst files to their online archive (which is really just a second email storage on the back end). Takes forever, then half don’t import properly, then you get them to re-run it and maybe it works but you have duplicates. Deleted emails that need recovery a month after they realized they needed it.
Sometimes it makes me realize why companies push users to just use the Webapp, but there’s always something.
Didn’t even touch the distros or shared emails/calendars yet lol
The short version is that I explained that we have a company policy that we are support, not education.
This is not a support issue because no technical issue is preventing the user from getting this completed.
The sheer volume of people I’ve encountered through numerous jobs that are on high wages but lack basic skills astounds me.
They have other skills you don’t have, that are more important for those high paying jobs.
Like faking genuine interest in the shit their higher-ups blather on about, convincingly laughing at racist and misogynist jokes, backstabbing their peers when a position opens up, and doing the most demeaning tasks with a smile and a “thank you”.
I mean, yeah. You ever ask an average software “engineer” to have a constructive conversation with someone a different department? It’s a nightmare.
The people with the worst virtual meeting presences are the VPs and above. They expect us to shovel their shit. Like, buy a fucking mic and a light, pay for more than DSL broadband, and shut the fucking door so I can stop hearing whatever your teenage asshole kid is doing.
EDIT: FWIW managers at most levels aren’t much better, they live by the example set by the superiors they so idolize.
I work on a team that teaches courses on how to use specific programs. I’m at job level 1. A job level 3 guy keeps asking me to schedule meetings with him so I can teach him how to use the specific programs so then he can do the job he was hired for and teach other people how to use these specific programs.
Bruh, I’m not one for office drama, but I would recommend keeping records of that if no-one else knows he’s doing that to you.
Why can’t level 3 dude schedule a meeting with you? Instead of asking you to arrange the meeting
Because he doesn’t actually have any interest in doing things himself. He has no technical ability but sweet talked himself into this position. I won’t lift a finger for him on this as it’s not my responsibility so we’ll see if he tries to throw me under the bus and how my management reacts.
