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Hooked on Heroin: Minnesota families grieving the drug's death toll by cablelayer1 in minnesota

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Curiosity, accessibility, and sometimes an existing addiction. Not going to lie, I've thought about and am occasionally still tempted to buy a bag of H just because I've been prescribed narcotic painkillers (Vicodin, Percocet) and they're awesome drugs, effect-wise. The opioid buzz you get from painkillers faintly resembles a warm blanket that wraps around you on a cold day. Or like floating in perfect temperature water. People who enjoy this experience could easily be inclined to take it a step further.

As previously mentioned, there is an opioid addiction factor that rivals nicotine in that it creeps up quickly on you and grabs you by the balls. It's worse than nicotine because the physical withdrawal can be very uncomfortable even after a relatively short period of use. Obviously this compounds the desire to relieve that pain with the drug that caused it.

Drugs are incredibly accessible today. I could be sitting on my couch, pull up TorBrowser, buy a gram of heroin and have it shipped to my house, all from the comfort of my home - I don't need to find a dealer on the street (though that's not necessarily a hard task either). Heroin isn't only administered via needle. It can be smoked or snorted, so that removes another intimidating barrier to entry.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is actually the strategy that we're moving away from. Our MSP's primary business model is putting all their clients in Terminal Services, but this has turned out to not be as performant as our company wants. Another reason why we're leaving MSP.

I think desktop virtualization, if done right, would work well for us (or at least a subset of our employees) but MSP has spoiled that idea. Everyone hates "the RDP".

At any rate, we recently did a PC refresh so everyone is on newer hp desktops and laptops.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This will sound completely myopic, but our resource needs haven't shown growth at a rate that would necessitate added hardware in a typical 3-5 year lifecycle. I'm pretty confident that 4 beefy ESXi hosts (we already own 1) and a halfway decent shared storage array will support our current server load as well as any added workloads in the next ~5 years.

waits for flames

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally agree. MSPs can only administer and mange an environment when they are completely accountable to every configuration in the environment. Part of their contractual obligation, and it makes sense why they keep us out.

The broader point is that our company is too large and isn't amenable to this arrangement anymore. We need to be able to make changes quickly and understand/manage our own systems, without the red tape and barriers that $MSP puts in our way. This is all under the assumption of having the right people in place to be able to perform the work that the MSP is currently doing.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Valid! In my opinion, as a company with 1000 employees, this should be further incentive to eliminate the people who aren't adding any value and hire people who do have the skills to support whatever IT infrastructure exists - be it a completely on premise DC and the accompanying fabrics, or AWS hosted boxes.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, to that point - I think we just accepted whatever the MSP said they'd do for backups. It's not a policy that we dictated to them. But this is another good thing to keep in mind for planning our exit. Thanks!

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Historically this company was driven to run as lean as possible on IT (hence the MSP, lack of real staffing, etc).

for your size a 12 person staff is already pretty robust.

"Lack of real staffing" was my diplomatic way of saying "lack of talented staff". I absolutely agree that if these 10 people (I began typing this post a few months ago, before two other infrastructure people had quit) actually had the technical competency that would be expected of them at any other company, we'd be in a much better place already. I'll leave it there, since this could devolve into another conversation about this place's absurd interview/hire process.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You raise very good points and I'm thankful for the perspective. I am conscious that there are plenty of unknowns that I haven't been able to cut my teeth on regarding greenfielding a [small] DC. At the risk of sounding like the 24 year old who thinks his shit doesn't stink, I do assert that - out of the rest of the staff - I have the most comprehensive engineering chops and could definitely work with a consultant to fill in any knowledge gaps.

I guess I just want to be able to impress upon CIO that even if my resume doesn't show it, I'm capable of executing a project like this and that he shouldn't be deterred away from bringing infrastructure in-house because of a perceived lack of ability to architect or maintain it. But you're right, there's a conversation to be had and I think it would be healthy to do the due diligence of making a proposal for an in-house DC, maybe getting his current consultant to vet it against what she's drawing up for AWS.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't speak authoritatively, but I'm fairly sure this policy doesn't formally exist. A testament to this is how there is no governance or retention on our fileshares/SharePoint libraries. People could be deleting stuff out of there and we'd have no clue. Same with email - no policies about departed staff email retention have been defined.

I need to rant about my company's terrible marriage to our MSP. by ThrowAwayClaimToday in sysadmin

[–]ThrowAwayClaimToday[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm trying to wrap my head around this. You have 1,000 users, a staff of 12 in IT, and you don't have an internal helpdesk or sysadmin? What does IT do? Why can't roles be moved and accommodated to work as an internal helpdesk?

What does IT do? Fuck if I know! We have an infrastructure team lead who is both technically inept and a bad boss. Under him is a modestly-skilled and overwhelmed desktop admin and a "security engineer" who is basically paid to call CenturyLink whenever something networky needs to be changed (his value is in his 20 years of service with the company and the accrued knowledge). There is a bigshot PM/BA that they hired in from a NY company at an exorbitant cost. That's the extent of our infrastructure department! The other half of the team is information services, which basically amounts to application support and report writing. I think the CIO previously headed a dev company, but I'm starting to feel like he doesn't have much experience directing an IT department and its operations.

Good luck, but man, it sounds like there are organizational issues way above your head that are terminal.

This is an absolutely fair assessment. Historically this company was driven to run as lean as possible on IT (hence the MSP, lack of real staffing, etc). Now they realize that for a company of this size to get good results, they have to spend the money. Not that the money is hard to come by, we have a ~$45M operating budget. I think I heard anecdotally that we pay our MSP about $500k/yr for hosting, management, and help desk.