RE: @simple_sabotage@mastodon.social
This one makes me think about my brief tenure at an MSP. All the work was pointless, but one part of the job was particularly stupid. They called it preventative maintenance, but it achieved almost nothing useful.
Step one was to find last month's PM spreadsheet, rename it, and clear out all the values. These spreadsheets evolved over time from a single primordial source, and we often wildly different between customers. But they always had a few fields in common; things such as CPU usage, Memory usage, and installed firmware version.
Now, these PMs were done monthly, quarterly, or yearly, at whatever time of day the scheduling department assigned them to us. So, one time, we would check the CPU and memory on a firewall at noon, when everyone was out for lunch. Then, a month later, we'd check it at 2pm, when usage was significantly higher.
I tried explaining how this was not a useful data point, how we needed to pull this data every 300 seconds or less, make some useful graphs so we could see actual trends. That just got me labeled as lazy. Almost all the data we were expected to manually extract and put into the spreadsheet was like this. Useless, single point in time data points that gave you no real insight.
Then there was the audit portion of the task. "Go over" the configuration and highlight any issues you find. I always noticed I wrote far, far more information down than the technician who had authored the previous month's spreadsheet I had used as a template. As for results, the configurations were often terrible, had been modified in field numerous times, and had some serious yard work needed. This made the task easy. Where other technicians wrote three sentences, I wrote five paragraphs.
I should note, I had never felt I had been particularly good at writing reports.
I would spend about 4 minutes on the useless data point shit, because I automated it best I could for multiple platforms early on. Then I'd spent 30-40 minutes finding the glaring issues in the configurations and Bob's your uncle.
Well, it turns out that PM was _supposed_ to take two hours. It also turns out, that I was supposed to write less, it was making them look bad. When I showed my boss how I extracted the useless data points en masse, he got angry and reminded me that, "We have a healthy mistrust of automation here." Dude, WTF? If you don't like automation, don't work with computers!
So, they wanted me to spend more time, producing less. All so they could say to the customer, "We spent two hours auditing your firewall, and only found minor issues! We also need to schedule two hours of billable time to patch your firmware after hours!"
MSP work is such a scam to its clients, I was absolutely not cut out for it. All efficiency is tossed aside in the name of making your services seem that much more valuable to the clients. It took three hours! It must be important!
