Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Ding Dong Bosses.

Oh, that reminds me... I heard from one of my former co-workers about one of his more recent frustrations.

The No IT experienced boss decides to tell my co-worker that he needs to cut back on his overtime.

Well, that's all good and what not, I mean, with the economy not being so great and needing to cut back on spending... One of the better places to cut back on spending is to not encourage overtime.

Just one problem... When your boss is the one who decides to pile work after work... Ignoring things like "Hey, we need to research this before we can say this is working..." with time tables that are on the level of "I'm the customer and what I say is right!" expectations. You soon learn that the brain dead don't take reality into consideration.

The old military axiom of "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." This is due to the fact that any plan laid out assumes perfect conditions and the enemy doing exactly what you expect. And as noted with "Operation Market Garden" and the Battle of the Bulge in World War II... Plans like that don't always follow through what you think they will.

So back to the Mr "No IT Experience" IT director. He obviously didn't talk or understand the situation my former co-worker has to deal with. Which is no surprise. He never, once, bothered to understand the process. He never, once, bothered to communicate with other people.

Why? Because, he is like the puppy dog, wanting to make people think he is doing great for the company and telling people it can be done. And that is the problem today with a lot of companies. Left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and the left hand making promises it can't keep because he thinks the right hand can do it.

Again, I always say that people expect IT to pull stuff out of their butts like we can poop golden eggs. To be honest... Even the best of us can't do that. When you have no resources to do testing, or only production resources to test upon... You are playing with fire standing next to gasoline. And when you rush people to get it going with the belief you know what you are talking about but don't have the understanding or experience behind it... You are basically shooting yourself in the foot.

Suffice it to say, said IT director is getting demoted by the end of this month, from what I hear. In all honesty, I think the new president of the company should seriously review his decisions and consider asking him to "retire" from the company. He is young enough to find another job, but at this point, he has done quite enough damage in the year he has been with the company as the IT director that his future prospects at the company are at the end and should not continue.

So... How Anti-Virus Suites handle certain things.

I found something entertaining on a forum for one of the Anti-Virus programs out there.

AVG posted something in response to a person using their Free version of AVG. They consider Office Macro viruses "obsolete". By this, their solution for documents infected with the macro virus should either be deleted or the users who want to keep them, should clean the documents themselves, as the current version of Office Suite programs have protection against Macro Viruses as long as people keep the security high enough to block the execution of Macros.

This is great, but big draw back on this concept. The target audience their product is for cheap people... And most of them will also be non-technical people. Non-technical people who will look at you and go, "Buh?" as to how to do this.

As much as it is 'obsolete', people sometimes might want the program to clean it if it can. What if it was a bunch of old documents that have the virus? I mean, there are people who do have old files and heck, I have seen some people who have not activated anti-virus on their laptops cause they didn't know they had to.

Well, I can understand that a free AV solution isn't suppose to be fully featured, but I think in that same post, this is also how their paid version works. Yikes. I hope a lot of you people don't have old office files saved somewhere and need them again. Cause AVG won't help you with them.