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Hello CSers, long time no see. Allow me to kick off my gran retour with a little self-agrandizement.... and self-pwnage.
Now you see, in my absence I've been educated and uplifted, more than tripled my yearly income and in less than two years at my new job, my boss is giving me senior level work and trying to get me promoted to senior. They love me there, they really do. I've been told multiple times I bring insights to the job that frankly, not many of my coworkers have.
You probably know where this is going. (Of course you do, this is Oops, wherein we admit our own failings!)
As we all well know, nothing, but nothing, makes one infallible. Nothing makes one immune to being stupid, or making very basic mistakes. Not education, or skill, or money.
And so it happens that I take on a support case where the customer is having trouble with her database scans. Our product being a data security product, one of its many features is to scan your database and classify your data and find vulnerabilities in your server. Normally this is all fine, but occasionally things go wrong and scans don't work, returning no data, hanging, or returning errors.
I begin troubleshooting, asking questions via email, and even getting on a webex (screen sharing) with her to work on it live. I resolve the issues with one of her servers, but the scan still fails on the other one.
She asks if there are any pre-requisites for the scan, any configuration she might have missed or maybe something needs to be loaded on the server. I tell her no, our scans don't have any requirements for certain files on the server, all of the needed configuration should be in the GUI on our end.
And so it happens that I have to take a day off to deal with some family issues, and on that day another engineer takes over the case.
Let me pause a moment to give you some background on this other engineer. She's been with the company far longer than I have. She works in the main office in California, with people who also have similar amounts of experience with the company, and some with far, far more skill than anyone else in the company.
And yet she's lazy, whiny, and quite often just plain wrong. She is certainly not particularly skilled. Seriously, she's often asked me for help with basic things, and occasionally butted in on my cases to offer some useless suggestion.
She takes over my case while I'm out, and sends the customer the exact section in our manual where it describes a file that needs to be created on certain types of servers (of which this was one) and what to put in it.
And sure enough, that resolved the customer's problem.
Yeah I could've just died that day.
The only thing I can say in my defense is our doc sucks and is rarely of any help in troubleshooting a situation, so of course it'd be the furthest thing from my mind.
Oh, and that engineer?
She was promoted to senior recently.
Now you see, in my absence I've been educated and uplifted, more than tripled my yearly income and in less than two years at my new job, my boss is giving me senior level work and trying to get me promoted to senior. They love me there, they really do. I've been told multiple times I bring insights to the job that frankly, not many of my coworkers have.
You probably know where this is going. (Of course you do, this is Oops, wherein we admit our own failings!)
As we all well know, nothing, but nothing, makes one infallible. Nothing makes one immune to being stupid, or making very basic mistakes. Not education, or skill, or money.
And so it happens that I take on a support case where the customer is having trouble with her database scans. Our product being a data security product, one of its many features is to scan your database and classify your data and find vulnerabilities in your server. Normally this is all fine, but occasionally things go wrong and scans don't work, returning no data, hanging, or returning errors.
I begin troubleshooting, asking questions via email, and even getting on a webex (screen sharing) with her to work on it live. I resolve the issues with one of her servers, but the scan still fails on the other one.
She asks if there are any pre-requisites for the scan, any configuration she might have missed or maybe something needs to be loaded on the server. I tell her no, our scans don't have any requirements for certain files on the server, all of the needed configuration should be in the GUI on our end.
And so it happens that I have to take a day off to deal with some family issues, and on that day another engineer takes over the case.
Let me pause a moment to give you some background on this other engineer. She's been with the company far longer than I have. She works in the main office in California, with people who also have similar amounts of experience with the company, and some with far, far more skill than anyone else in the company.
And yet she's lazy, whiny, and quite often just plain wrong. She is certainly not particularly skilled. Seriously, she's often asked me for help with basic things, and occasionally butted in on my cases to offer some useless suggestion.
She takes over my case while I'm out, and sends the customer the exact section in our manual where it describes a file that needs to be created on certain types of servers (of which this was one) and what to put in it.
And sure enough, that resolved the customer's problem.
Yeah I could've just died that day.
The only thing I can say in my defense is our doc sucks and is rarely of any help in troubleshooting a situation, so of course it'd be the furthest thing from my mind.
Oh, and that engineer?
She was promoted to senior recently.
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