Gonna have to create a Honeypot or write some cool ransomeware, leak your creds online from a new account at an internet cafe, wait for someone to log in to your account, turn in the behavior to IT, convince them you need a new account to work while they figure out what damage your original account caused, go back to Internet cafe and message Debra she’s a bitch, then apologize to your team and tell them you have a new account and will need access and probably also an extension on the project due to all this craziness on your original account where your work was. You may also need to put a broken keylogger on your own keyboard and be prepared to toss your own apartment in case you need plausible deniability.
Did someone grant access for this device. It’s my first time logging from my desktop
Hi team, it seems that my access to the spec has expired. Can someone please reinstate?
But in some cases you can be almost done anyway - I’m reminded of an old cartoon where the manager says, “I’ll go find out what they want, the rest of you start coding.”
That’s why one of my primary goals at any workplace is to become trusted and respected enough to say no to anyone including my boss
Ditto.
I don’t fuck around with workload and priorities.
“Hey can you can X done this month?”.
“Possibly. I have to review the requirements and see if it fits on the schedule. Otherwise you’ll have to bump down A, B or C I’m working on. A and B are due this month. Decide if C or X is more important.”
I think I’m at that level. Though it’s less about trust and respect and more about fear. Nobody know how anything works, so they’re afraid that things will break and nobody will know how to fix it if I’m gone.
I learned this when they were talking about doing RTO and I just said “No, I’m not doing that.”
I suspect people think I play favourites because some people almost always get told no, while others don’t. But really it’s more due to the fact the managers are clueless so they’re always asking for stuff that doesn’t make sense, while the people who actually do work make sensible requests so their requests get done.
Learned this the hard way. Open the links ASAP and request access immediately; you can then ignore the project safely for the next quarter.
You’re welcome.
Fuckin’ Tony Hawk right here.
More like Phony Schlock. I’m just faking it until I can retire at this point.
Sort of backwards, but when I request access to something my team is supposed to be working on, it takes roughly enough time for them to get the work done if they are blasting through it. Like, I don’t care, I’m only going to check before the project deadline comes up, but don’t burn yourself out for me. This scales inversely with age.
So it takes them longer to report on it than it does for them to do it the older they get? I’m not sure I understand. Maybe you need to explain it with crayons for my old man brain.
Yeah, that was unclear. The more late career people will just give me access immediately no matter where they are. Early career people will bust their ass getting more progress in before giving me access. Which, again, I don’t care when they do it until I have to shield them from upper management.
That’s bcz i don’t care. I get my work done. If I wasn’t getting it done, I wouldn’t be there. At least that’s my rational.
After covid, I kind of just stopped caring as much. I do my job, I get stuff done. But, I don’t go above and beyond anymore. They think I do, and that’s good enough for me.
That just sounds like unprepared people not giving you something that doesn’t exist.
Hey, sorry, I was working on a offline copy. Can you give me access to sync my changes?
If you didn’t have access how do you have an offline copy?
Says it’s a project update, I’m assuming iterative so presumably I had access to the last version as a stakeholder.
“hey, I don’t know what happened, but I seem to have lost access to the page. Can you approve me again?”
They know. People aren’t that dumb.
Can confirm, sometimes they are that dumb - because sometimes screwy shit actually does happen.
They suspect. I’m a teacher, and I can promise you that of the five or so students who have crazy technical issues every year, four of them are making them up. I just can’t tell you which ones (at least not with enough certainty to make an accusations).
I suspect with high confidence, though, which is worse in terms of the reputation that earns you with me than the alternative “hey I messed up, can you grant me access and extend the deadline by a week?”. Highly prefer honesty over bullshit.
That’s fair. I would also prefer they just tell the truth, but I don’t hold flimsy excuses against students (I teach adult immigrants the local language, so they’re generally pretty internally motivated and they have a lot more responsibility for their education than students in most other situations). Actively coming to me and requesting an extension would likely be a net positive, reputation-wise, tbh.
“I bet IT messed it up”
Be careful. IT with good CYA has logs. If they are really good at CYA, the logs have logs. They might be a terrible IT, but they might be good at CYA (or friends with security, who makes good IT CYA look like chump change).
The odds of your boss asking IT to pull the logs to see if you ever had access to a document is unlikely
Let’s be real, IT talks, we are curious, but we don’t really care too much. Depending on who asks, yep the logs are there and it only takes a few clicks or a quick one-liner to get them, most people won’t ask for them though.
The sheer number of ‘hey, check out what so and so is up to’ that come through our chats is insane, I’ve seen so many students in schools setting up proxies or hiding games in normal looking websites… It’s honestly pretty cool the commitment some people have for not doing what they should.
Let’s be frank. The boss probably does not even know what a log is, let alone that people can pull it.
One of the more important lessons learned from a career in and around IT: no one holds a grudge like senior, non manager IT staff. And they turn up in the strangest meetings/locations. Hence the warning of “be careful”.
You could always go another route:
Did all the heavily lifting prep work, it’s all smooth sailing from here
