Gawker: valleywag, office politics

How do I get my sysadmin to do anything?

Paul Boutin — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 13:08:18 EST

PAUL BOUTIN — What do those guys in Operations do all day? You can never get your systems administrator's help when you need it. That's because you haven't figured out how to grease the skids: Say hello, fill out the paperwork, and never forget the sysadmin's secret super power.No one sets out to be a professional systems administrator — do you ever see kids wearing toy pagers playing sysadmin? For those fluent with computers but uninterested in writing huge software programs, it's a pretty good job. Except for the part where they have to deal with you. Treat your admin accordingly, and you'll find your PC mysteriously runs better than anyone else's.

Say hello. Even when you don't need something. You say a big Hi to the pretty lady at the front desk every time you pass. Why not treat the tech guy the same? Sure, he doesn't say anything back. Don't be fooled. Sysadmins are like cats — he won't acknowledge you, but he's mentally keeping score.
Don't question what he does all day. Systems administrators are like firemen and cops. If you don't have a couple of bored ones hanging around, you'll be sorry when there's an emergency.
Fill out the stupid request form or other idiotic bureaucratic formality every time the printer jams. If you go directly to Joe Admin for help without putting a request in the system, you'll eventually get him fired. The CEO asks the department head for an automated help desk report to justify headcount, and see? What does that guy do all day? He doesn't even say hi.
Treat everything he does as a favor. Like most first-responder jobs, sysadmin is a career cul-de-sac — the only way out is to become, ugh, a manager. Let him savor the delusion that everyone envies his gig in Operations because he's got all the root passwords and triple-encrypted card keys to the server room.
Never forget: He can read your mail.

Paul Boutin is a former systems administrator.

Yahoo insider believes you have his stapler

Nick Douglas — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 10:30:00 EDT

CEOs and founders may fight, but little guys have the best horror stories, whether they're sitting outside the VP's office for an hour or losing their fancy chairs. An alleged employee at Lloyd Braun's Yahoo Media Group sent this inside report. Make sure you read the whole story.

In case you guys hadn't heard, the work is finally finished on the permanent YMG space in Santa Monica. We've been moved around to a couple of different permanent spaces in the last year, but we've finally moved into Lloyd's vision of the future of the Yahoo! Media Group. And in that future, former TV execs will treat internet employees with as much contempt as his network staffers undoubtedly suffered. (I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this.)

Here are some quick highlights of the new work space:

The 6th floor is the exclusive domain of the executives. Regular employees' security badges won't open the doors, and the receptionists up there make it clear that none of us peons should be up there.

Cubicle walls have been shortened to about 4', so now you have no privacy, and it's pretty much impossible to do ANYTHING louder than typing without completely distracting or annoying your neighbors. Having to whisper while on conference calls is particularly fun. I'm not sure why we didn't just get desks.
We used to have a nice, big breakroom with a few tables, and some games and a flatscreen TV. It served as a lunchroom and lounge (a lot of us watched the World Cup in there); but that's gone. Apparently we're not supposed to get together with co-workers anymore.

I bring this stuff up because in spite of a lot of chaos in the last few years, Yahoo! has been a cool, creative place to work; now it's pretty obvious that Lloyd & Terry [Semel, CEO] think that there's no excuse for us to actually enjoy our jobs. I guess the message is that we all just need to shut the fuck up and get back to work. (On stupid shit like The Nine.) Anyone else that's going to move down here from Sunnyvale is in for an ugly surprise.

Jason Calacanis, secret king of AOL

ndouglas — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:30:00 EDT

Blog mogul Jason Calacanis, who just joined AOL last year, is already running the company, judging from his upcoming meeting at the beverage coaster company's HQ. From the ambitious exec's blog:

Team AOL,

I'm going to be in Dulles next Friday, April 28th and I wanted to invite *anyone* at AOL to come to a completely open discussion of where we should take *our* company. There are a lot of folks I haven't had a chance to meet and I thought this might be a good way to reach out to everyone.

It may sound like Jason wants credit for everyone's good ideas — or that he thinks he can sell a new idea to the VPs when everyone else has failed. But that's cynical. Clearly, Jason must have been promoted to CEO and he's just too humble to say so.

Or he's just beefing up his AIM buddy list.

AOL Open Office Hours (in Dulles next Friday): Let's talk product! [Jason Calacanis]

Secret spelling fix update: Thanks to AOL's C.K. Sample for proofreading Valleywag!

iPod workers lose their seats

ndouglas — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:26:53 EDT

An Apple insider reports a cruel game of musical chairs at the iPod group. From now on, everyone gets just one rolling chair. The decision's retroactive — that's right, people are losing their office chairs to save Apple a buck (or satisfy some administrator's lust for power).

So maintenance men are walking through the halls, pulling second chairs from people's offices — sometimes taking the engineer's chair and leaving the lesser guest chair — and replacing them with cheap Office Depot jobbies.

Word is, folks aren't happy, but no one's iPod-whipped a worker yet.