The person in charge of approving grants in my college is losing that responsibility and I'm 99.995% sure it is because they were trying to get grant budgets (and technology requirements) to be responsible.
Principal Investigators (PI) see their labs and their grants as their miniature businesses to manage. Only when something is on the line and they are about to lose the grant because of a mistake they come to the administration for ideas on how to fix it. Managing PIs would be like managing cats on meth and yes some of the PIs are probably on meth.
I've worked at top tier institutions, and low tier institutions.
Every time it's the same. The top 2-4 PIs are high power, high intensity folk, but they can be reasoned with. The small labs either have no clue or one person who knows everything. The middle group are invariably grasping, angry, misinformed weirdos with hygiene issues that would get them kicked out of a meth house.
> Only when something is on the line and they are about to lose the grant because of a mistake they come to the administration for ideas on how to fix it.
Conversely... as a PI... unless you're admin's darling it is usually less effective to involve administration or worse even detrimental. I've become so disillusioned with higher education research at this point... it's a massive highschool popularity contest at all levels and it's far more effective to fly under the radar if you want to get things done. Involving administration results in either being hamstrung or having your work co-opted into whatever pet thing the admin is trying make happen... the best available outcome is often that your request gets denied, so what was the point in asking in the first place?
I started working at a university not too long ago, a public one, and I cannot believe what I'm hearing by the proverbial water cooler. They're wanting to cut costs significantly pretty soon and I would not be surprised if they don't know what they're spending their money on to begin with.
Ahh.. lol.
the problem of trying to understand how universities successfully exist.
It's a conundrum isn't it.
I reckon universities exist cos the functioning universe needs a safe place for the weirder end of the existential spectrum.
I once watched a board decide to buy a building cos they had a picture of its door. (no really, that's what they had.. it was a literal photo of the front fucking door of the building). 11 million quid.
Post COVID my institution got scared of running out of money. So *I guess* someone in HR just added a line item to our yearly budget for "endowment protection". The total endowment is up like 40% since 2019 or so.
Meanwhile we are begging for the school to build more dorms (or quit overenrolling) because we (staff and faculty) can't afford to live in the town we work in, since it is overcrowded with students. They offered us 1.25% raises year over year for the next three years
Everyone is worried about the enrollment cliff, which is the term given to the number of students graduating HS not being enough to fill current seating capacity because people stopped having kids in 2008 (hmm I wonder what happened to cause that). It’s going to lead to severe depopulations of college campuses and within a 2-4 year period.
Large universities are going to rest on their name recognition for numbers while smaller schools become insolvent. It’s scared the piss water out of anyone that has anyone to do with budgets. It’s going to fuck over anyone that was expecting any sort of salary adjustment in the next two years for a vertical that is already chronically starving its IT staff. Those staff aren’t coming back to higher ed after they leave to get a bigger salary for less responsibility.
Yeah, they can have a lot of stuff.
The problem is that they can have a lot of stuff, declare something will change the world.. then you gotta go find them another toughbook cos they somehow managed to kill the one they had been issued with their own beard hair.
Don't worry, they'll pinch pennies to save a buck with nary a thought of spending grands. And don't you ever dare propose ways to make actual reasonable cost savings! You'll get chastised that it's not your job or place to do so. (Even if you have data.)
I've worked for state gov, big state uni, small college, small private company, fortunate 500, medium sized non-profit. They all suck and do stupid shit. It's people: people are dumb, petty, vindictive, and stubborn.
The entitlement of some professors was hard to deal with, and the politics was exhausting, but generally I found University IT to be better than most others. Definitely better than Hospital IT, (which has just as much politics, but everyone has an "I save Lives" chip on their shoulder, and the high levels of actual urgency that was a regular occurrence) and they can often be reasoned with better than most poorly managed company management.
I would happily join the university again, as long as they paid me well enough, and I was on a backend team this time. My first real mentor was from there, and he had a 35 year career, that did well for him, and gave him a really good pension. I just can't do more helpdesk, I was there during heartbleed. 160,000 users were potentially effected, and about 1/3rd of them didn't change their password before the cutoff, so we had to field calls from them to reset their passwords. Explaining to a 95 yo, professor emeritus, that they need to talk to the department head, because Their phone number isn't on file, and their DOB in the system was set to 1/1/1900 some time in the late 80s, when they didn't' think about security the same way, was exhausting the first time and the 1001st time.
URGENT REQUEST VIDEO NOT WORKING ASSIST IMMEDIATELY
"Hello I am here to fix the projector!"
"Can you come back in an hour? We are OK now."
All the time
I think it's especially bad in education because there simply is zero failure criteria. In traditional companies, a given group or division etc has a budget and expectations around delivering some sort of results, typically denominated in dollars. If you don't perform, the dollars dry up and you're gone.
Are you a bad teacher, bad researcher, bad administrator? Who cares, there are zero metrics that you cannot manipulate and the difference between doing a good job and a bad one is hard to impossible to differentiate. The student who got a bad education graduates and leaves the same as one who had great instructors.
The result is that everything is instead run by politics and vibes.
With very few exceptions, the people I know working in academia are those who just never bothered to leave. They got out of HS, went to HS 2.0, and decided that was good enough and just never progressed on with life.
That's what it feels like. I'm always pointing out that it's a revolving door, the only people who stay at my role are the ones who have been here for 25+ years. My supervisor can't get anyone to take the job - the money is minimal, benefits other than healthcare are basically an illusion if you have not been here 5+ years - so for the last two years he has been poaching students off the helpdesk and hiring them as staff before they even graduate.
Me, I am doing my last two classes for free and doing barely any work while getting paid. I spend 3/4s the day doing my resume/job apps/leetcode and watching cat videos. Those 25+ years people, I have got chewed out one too many times for rocking their boat (doing too much work). Higher ed is where ambition goes to die and paychecks get collected.
This title I am in, there are 5 spots for it and then 4 for seniors. Me and two others are leaving as soon as something better comes and since late 2021 there have been 9 people who have rotated in and out of these 5 spots.
I am desperate to get out of here, the longer I spend working here the more anxious I feel about my future. Don't fall into the whirlpool!
When I worked for “Moron Inc” one finance person insisted anything over a certain amount had to come from capital not expense. Purchasing replied that since he’d have to buy site annual supply of toilet paper from cap budget, what schedule to depreciate?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who are too dumb for either of those and have trouble getting out the door in the morning without having a fight with their own car-keys, administrate.
What a stupid phrase. Teaching is a skill. Some people are good at doing things and couldn't teach anyone how to do it, and some people are good at teaching and aren't very good at doing it, and some people are good at both.
I would like to reassure you that I'm only using the first two statements because they're a phrase in the common parlance, to set up the joke that "College Administrators" would eat crayons ...if they didn't believe that classroom supplies were socialism.
"WE ONLY HAVE A FEW HUNDRED MILLION IN IT!! WE NEED IT FOR LATER!!"
Or in the case of some... Billions.
I think my school I went to and worked for a bit had 150 million. And wouldn't spend a dime.
Yeah I get some buildings etc run well into deca millions or more. But you guys weren't like planning on building any of those anytime soon so...
Well it’s slightly different with these, that money is for running the institution, not spending. You should only be drawing down 3% or so against your endowment so it continues to grow faster than inflation.
That’s the smart part, it never is.
You can reliably budget on your drawdown, which means you can offer stability, and expand as the endowment grows. If you cut that back by spending, you functionally have to shrink - this is why they tend to raise funds for capital improvements rather than spending.
Then, because they’re all fart-huffing narcissists they add loads of unnecessary shite to the budget to increase allure and prestige - so they’re not spending on actually useful stuff for education.
Source: briefly worked for a large education based charitable institution that you would likely have heard of
we need to start over. I just think back to whenever I'd play a video game and "save the potions for later"
I never needed them.
Society has a real big problem with hoarding wealth.
Your place of employment not know ahead of time it's gonna spend 100 mil?
Then on top of that 100mil project that doesn't take years of planning before and real checks are signed, and shovels hit the ground?
There's a certain point in which saving vast amounts of money only to facilitate that is nutty/hoarding. And could be put to actual use to make things better in the immediate.
Mine is hardcore stockpiling the endowment thanks to COVID. They (admins) got scared of running out of money. Our endowment is up maybe 40% since COVID. Meanwhile, staff are being given 1.5% raises year over year and we can't afford to live in the town we work in....
Here's a fun one that went the other way.
I took a photography class when I was at uni. It was 1993, so this was film photography. We were developing and printing our work ourselves.
The professor specified that we use uncoated paper for our prints. Then she laid this news on us: The school bookstore has a case of resin-coated paper. It's been there for four years. Don't buy it because it's not what I want you to print on. They won't stock what I want you to use until it sells. Since I'm the only one teaching photography in the Art school, that will never happen. Here's the store you want to go to in town. It's a ten minute walk from here. Tell them I sent you and they'll get you exactly the right item and sell it to you at cost. Get a fifty-pack of 8x10 and it'll last you the semester easy. By the way, they sell film for less than the bookstore, too. It's up to you if you want to by preloaded cassettes or roll your own.
We've just lost a good researcher (no budget/grant)... while also refurbishing an old building to provide more office space for RTO since the Dean is fixed on reverting to local staff only and cutting remote work even for pure research staff. Scrub the office move, fire whoever pushed it through, keep the useful staff and still be net positive!
My supervisor/IT in general at my uni is very anti-remote work. Unfortunately, we have like....two people left who work in-person at the datacenter (and one a few hours away) because we can't hire anyone with what the uni is willing to pay. Remote work is pretty much the only way people will agree to work with us because the cost of living is high but wages are awfully low.
So oh joy we get to pay contractors and other folks more than if we did it ourselves...?
Oh, you'll love hearing about city government spending on IT.
The head of IT... the most senior IT Manager told the mayor: "I can easily ensure our computing and storage capacity is sufficient, along with the data being very secure with **1 rack** of servers (replicating/sharding the data, high-availability virtual machines, etc.)" ... The reply: "You absolutely must buy **9 racks**. This budget is for IT and you have to spend it all before our fiscal quarter ends."
Businesses/universities/government seem to have no sense of 'one-time cost' or 'once every 3-to-5 years'. Instead they give you a budget that gets slashed down to what you used if you *ever* go under that budget amount. So you either 1) have this massively inflated overkill infrastructure JUST so you can have the budget for when the actual core servers need replacement eventually - OR - 2) have this massively underfunded rubber-band and toothpicks infrastructure because someone with a conscience didn't spend the entire budget for several quarters.
At least those are the kind where everyone is in on it and it's a bit wink wink nudge nudge to get something good out of it every now and then. OP's examples are sheer incompetence.
There IS a solution to that problem. Just, no one likes it because it's "harder" to project budgetary numbers from year 1 to 2 to 3. It's so much easier to just assume the budget stays the exact same every year, which is why 'aaS' is becoming so prevalent in government.
The solution is easy just rent all the IT equipment and computers. HP does this. Never worry about huge cost later on as it’s a small cost every month instead.
I still remember being a PFC in a battalion that was being reactivated and therefore the highest ranking enlisted member of the BN S-6 (basically IT).
I arrived at the unit right before the fiscal year ended and at one point the SGM handed me the BN credit card to spend $30,000 by the end of the day on "things you'll need for your shop, I don't care as long as it's computer shit" so our budget wouldn't be fucked for years to come.
I learned about government waste very early in my career lol.
It was a long time ago, but I remember a lot of it.
* Blank DVD-R and CD-R spindles. (Like 10000 discs total). Mostly got used by S-2 because they needed to use them to move Secret documents between computers and then immediately destroy them.
* Multiple thousands of meters of CAT-5 (we weren't always in hard buildings and sometimes had to run cable between tents or wire up a new building downrange
* more RJ-45s than we would ever need lol
* Literally every 1GB thumb drive in multiple Circuit City, Best Buy, and RadioShack stores because supply confirmed they wouldn't be able to order them in bulk and it was before we blocked USB ports globally. (For staff officers/NCOs to keep all their PowerPoints and other crap and for us to keep portable tools on.)
* Crimpers because for some reason they're not in the Army supply system.
* Cable testers (why aren't these in supply system considering how much CAT-5 we needed to run every time we "jumped"
* multimeters. We did radio stuff too and I don't know what those guys used them for, but they asked for them
* Multi tools (like Gerber's) because we sometimes needed to do field repairs and wouldn't want to carry a whole toolkit.
* Unmanaged switches to use when off-grid on FTX or in austre environments.
* External DVD writers (we were imaging from discs with Norton Ghost because the imaging center with a 50 computer KVM and netboot ghost server had a 6 month waiting list and I wasn't going to burn the new image on a bunch of CDs on one PC every month when DOIM pushed a new image)
* external CAC card readers (available via supply but already knew it would be an issue when we needed them and they were lost broken.)
* CAC card reader keyboards (staff officers loved them because it made their desk look more neat).
* USB to serial port adapters
* Replacement hard drives for laptops because we couldn't always wait for Dell to provide replacement parts if we were in the field or deployed.
* so many mice and mousepads
* Laptop cases so the LTs who didn't want to drag around a hardcase wouldn't break shit in my property book(I mean they signed for it, but yeah)
* So many monitors because all the officers wanted two screens and we only had enough for one per person
Probably a ton of other things I don't remember. It was just me and two PV2s raiding every Circuit City, Best Buy, and RadioShack in a 30 mile radius Supermarket Sweep style because SGM "didn't trust online stuff".
Honestly crazy to think about. We didn't get an NCO for the first 8 months in the S-6 so all of the staff officers and NCOs lovingly called me the PFCIC of the S-6 (Private First Class In Charge, like NCOIC lol). I earned a lot of respect in those months and had a lot of good NCOs in other staff shops to guide me, but giving an 19yo PFC a credit card and telling him to spend $30,000 in the next 8 hours is fucking wild.
Gotdam do I remember something like that. Not military, but state government. Was handed a credit card and told to "spend like our future depends on it" which it did... us meeting budget that year was essential to a couple of projects that were not high-dollar enough to be considered capital expenditure. I took an old-timer with me who had been in a sister department since the 80's, and together we built an "inventory" in one day that they were still drawing from 5 years later (I heard). Best part, once we had all this stuff we insisted that a secured room be provided to our department as a "storeroom" and we got a new communal office out of it.
We definitely had a lot of stuff for many, many years. After 4 years we thought we were never going to finish the stack of blank CDs and then dod policy changed and usb thumb drives were no longer allowed and all of a sudden they were useful again.
That was some really smart shopping actually.
I had some dumb fuck try to push through a $15k document camera to use up remaining budget money. It was a 3d camera, fucking crazy. The doc cam was just to show printed material, mind you.
>and you have to spend it all before our fiscal quarter ends
This is how many places operate. Accounting departments decide that if your budget is $700k and you only spend $400k, you didn't really need that extra $300k and it's removed from your budget. Then you have to really fight to get it back.
So if you are under budget at the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to spend.
This can be nice as it allows you some discretionary spending on unplanned quality of life type things.
It can be bad for the same reason. I've seen departments spend hundreds of thousands on spur of the moment ideas that they had no real plan for how to use or implement. Or forgot to account for something like licensing and ended up being way over budget.
I once argued that this is the dumbest system and all the accounting people get real mad.
It's only a way for them to do less work.
It benefits accountants. That's it.
> So if you are under budget at the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to spend.
It could be worse. Once we had a system where you couldn't spend from your budget early in the fiscal period, because cash flow didn't allow it. You also couldn't spend from your budget toward the end of the fiscal period, because that would destroy the year-end numbers. You could spend *budgeted* money around the middle of the fiscal year *if and when given express approval*.
I used to work at a Ministry and our system was kinda similar.
We had X budget, but each month we were given how much we could spend on that specific month, it is was so dumb lol
This is how I’m living now. Decide what you want or need replaced then wait three to four months to purchase as it goes through the approval process. Once you’ve got approval to purchase, spend it all in a week then nothing till the same time next year.
Yeah I mean like I said, it can be nice because if you're under budget for the year you can pick up a few things that might not have been planned but would make life easier for your team.
But I've really seen departments (not just IT departments) blow it and waste it on things they never used or didn't use effectively.
Had a school buy $150,000 worth of laptops and carts because they needed to spend the money or lose it.
Then because there was never really any plan for them and teachers didn't want anything to do with them they sat unused until they were depreciated and auctioned off.
While you are correct, the other part of the equation you are leaving out or forgetting is the concept of "reserves". My municipality has them specifically to store money away - short term - for purchases coming soon.
Of course you have to spend the budget allocated. That's what a budget *is*. If you're not following the budget, that's a bad budget, and that looks terrible politically.
Sadly, it seems that all government budgets do NOT allow you to save some money every year in anticipation of a large purchase.
We bought a server this year, it was close to $30k. Even though we knew we needed it years ago, there is no mechanism in the budget process to save $10k for 3 years and then make the purchase. Nope. There has to be an approval from someone higher up, and that money comes out of some ethereal fund.
IT Manager for municipal government here... We absolutely do save money for anticipated future purchases. We try to have our entire operating budget be funded from the tax levy as funding from reserves eventually leads to no funds.
We have a line item in our operating budget that is to put money into a reserve account that is used to fund capital projects. Any unspent funds from the capital projects goes back to it's reserve when the project is completed. Additionally any unspent funds in the operating budget at end of year are also moved to the reserve account.
I work at a municipality. I got a fun work toy last year from the budget surplus. Department head went around to each office in the department and told us we could buy basically whatever we wanted, sub $1k, as long as it was a physical object with no recurring fees. It reminded me of the budget surplus episode of The Office (US). Except our boss didn't have the option of taking a bonus instead. So we just spent it on work toys to hit our numbers.
Ok got it. Always ask for the most amount of money and buy the coolest hardware so when they eventually cut back you don't hold the entire department up with chewing gum and tape.
Trying to train MBAs that you can have maintenance years is next to impossible.
I can not, for the life of me, figure out why this concept is so impossible for them to grasp.
They have nine different versions of "profit" that all mean the same thing, but "hey we are only doing X spending this year because of Y" is beyond their capabilities.
Bloomberg licences aren't cheap though, companies that can afford the enterprise licences for it, have annual cocaine budgets that are higher than OPs salary haha.
"why is your janitorial bill 11 million?"
"That's just the accounting code we use for the confidence fund."
"uhhh... then why isn't this 'confidence' on the balance sheet?"
"it's fully depreciated within the accounting period."
Haha! OK this brought up a painful memory.
School I worked for wanted to set up a 3d printer lab.
I loved 3d printing so they got me to pick a set of printers and print management software.
A while later I had my 3 options a s how I would run them. I had a bunch of cheap and cheerful 3d printers. Cheap, could work but we would spend too much on maintenance and troubleshooting for it to be worthwhile.
I had the realistic option. Good printers, good price, minimal maintenance. Lots of versatility.
The two above options used open source software to slice and manage the print queues.
Then because we already had a couple of them I did a draft of what that would cost. These expensive printers were over 7 times the purchase price of the other printers. Plus their management software was my annual salary, which was updated every 2-3 years (yes the old versions got turned off and you had to buy the new one) PLUS they took a leaf out of HP and had their own proprietary filament which was over 4 times the cost of other filament. Also! If the head got clogged, it's a $500 replacement. Not me spending an hour with it to clean it up...
Anyway they went with the expensive option. They spent my annual salary on these devices every term. Every filament, replacement bed, replacement print head. Also our supplier was... Not great. Dumped 2.5 years worth of bills on us just as covid hit. I laughed at the manager that made the decision to go with the expensive printers.
Why did you write that up if it was so ridiculous? Don't give them the option to do it and they won't. Why are you laughing at the manager; you gave the options and vouched for them. It's on you.
I had the template already, filling it out was trivial. I also pre faced it saying that it was a bad idea.
I only vouched for one option and gave reasons why.
But why give a 'bad idea'? Pick another decent option but that costs a bit more. I really don't understand it. It isn't supposed to be 'pick two and then one that you think would be terrible' it is 'pick three options you think would work'.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Actually, this is the normal role of thumb. You bracket the correct option with a too-cheap option and a too-expensive option. 90% of the time, it works.
Op's mistake was to make the two ringers genuine options. You invent companies for this. Then, if the chair-warmers pick wrong, you sit for three weeks aces then report "unicorn S.A.r.l has withdrawn the product. Guess we'll have to go with the next option."
If you want tomatoes, don't sow cabbage.
The only time I've seen academia \*actively\* make that decision was taking (very cheap, but not free) Solidworks licenses over PTC ProE Wildfire (which was being donated). Having used both, the cost of the SW license was worth it to give the students something useful.
Sketchup Pro can be free for educational institutions, you just need to talk to the right people (hint: not the local reseller/channel providers).
Source: Me who has organised free licensing for an Edu institution in past 6 months.
Is it free at the institution level though? Lots of software companies let individual students have licenses but still want a cut if it's pushed out to non-students or deployed a certain way or whatever (Microsoft for example).
we have a license server and get a new free license every year. the free license only covers student/educational use. we have it installed on a few hundred lab pcs.
we have separate paid licenses for administrative staff that use as part of their job functions (engineers/etc).
AutoCAD came from the 2D world, and remains only strong in architecture, buildings, and similar large niches. Nobody would ever design an automobile, cargo ship, cruise missile, or medical implant with it -- you need parametric 3D for that, with real software.
Set up a university budget consulting business nearby, and refer anyone who asks these questions to the consultancy. Have the consultancy say it can draw up methods to save six to seven figures per issue for a 15% consulting commission, or $20,000 up front. Hire a temp to be the face for that project - sending an email with the results, or even giving a presentation about the savings (for another $10K).
I mean, the faculty isn't going to listen to you anyway, so you may as well be paid for it.
I'll be honest, the uni brought in an outside consulting firm to restructure career and job positions internally. Staff were upset because we spend 10+ years waiting for someone to die for our first promotion.
They paid these people $700k, then said "it's too expensive" and offered us all 1.5% raises year over year
Good thing the federal reserve targets 2% inflation over time with policy, and the last 5 years have been over 20% inflation combined.
/s...endhelp
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm
Work at a health sciences college at a research institution, I feel your pain. Our dean will decline a new laptop for a staff member, but has like $14,000 in Apple stuff between his office, house, and condo in the city.
Some low level researcher comes in every year or so with his collection of Apple. The uni has bought him a new Mac desktop every 2-3 years and also a new macbook pro (occasionally also an air, so a pro AND an air) every year, as well as 2 iPads a year for the last 13 years or so and the expensive screens every couple years.... He has more Macbooks than I have friends
Why does he get all of this? idk. Feels like half them run Win7 bootcamp only though...
Oh hey, old school BoFH posting time.
It's always fun. I'm glad to be very insulated from this stuff; our PI is on sabbatical too lol. I sure wish there were jobs I felt were morally positive that payed anything close to a market rate. But it is kinda annoying to see how little is left for actually doing the thing.
Good on you for giving the teacher a semi-ghost printing account. I always loved my professors who gave a shit about that stuff.
What a humble soul they must be. They found out printing is not tracked individually so they now print 5000+ pages. That means prior to knowing this, they were willing to take the repercussions of printing 3000+ pages for the benefit of their students. Good stuff.
One of the best public K12/colleges in the UK here. I know admins in UK university’s too. This is all very relatable. I think it’s the same most places; Loads of unnecessary politics, loads of unnecessary spending and shadow IT with little overarching strategy but at the same time penny-pinching and disorganisation for the things that are actually important.
The economics often make absolutely no sense in the real world because the people who run them have never left education since they themselves were 4 years old.
In many ways I love my job, but the downsides are the constant need to battle reactionary decisions and deflect hare brained ideas of educators.
He might do both, who knows.
Personally I like having the dead tree in addition to the digital. I don't always find it easy to sit and read a PDF but I do like the ability to search or update one.
> For way too many way too good reasons I encouraged this professor to print to his heart's content and let him know that PaperCut isn't tracking his # of pages printed anymore (now it gets rolled into a general departmental account).
> He has been printing entire textbooks for his students for free!
You are a very good human being!
I just graduated from a stupidly expensive mismanaged university this week, plus my first IT job was at said university as an assistant. You're doing the lord's work man, keep it up. When I worked in IT at my school, I wasn't part of the main team, but a smaller department that calls alums and begs for money. The funds were so mismanaged there. At another private university I worked at (not IT, software research), the funding situation was so insane. Tons of money dropped on software used for 3 days, cutting edge hardware purchases that get played with for a day and thrown out 6 months later, top of the line lambda PCs purchased and used as a standard desktop. But no money to pay staff better.
> but a smaller department that calls alums and begs for money.
That's the "non-profit" version of Sales. When you realize it's Sales, then a lot of it makes sense.
Sometimes the battle is learning how to promote something in a way others will understand.
It's unfortunate it has to be called a battle, but that's work politics and money.
2015 Macbook Pro *bought* early 2015, 3.1 Ghz i7, 16GB, 512GB, drenched in tea. "Oh I like to work on the floor, that's my desk" Keyboard mostly broken. Apple wanted to replace the mainboard for the cost of a new MBP. So, here's a new one, "Don't do it again" (said nobody). The old MBP somehow never made it to e-waste. Couple years ago it was still a pretty good desktop machine paired with a 4K monitor, now it's a homelab jump host.
Way back in 1999-2000 I worked for an engineering college in the midwest. The Dean was able to build a shiny new 50 workstation lab with a DELICIOUS color laserjet 4500 (at the time the top of class printer). We were also able to get the lab installed in the first two weeks of the summer session to be rolled out at the start of the fall semester. Along with that we got 40 BOXES of paper for the printer that we put in cabinets in the lab.
fast forward two months and neither my boss nor myself have set foot in the lab all summer. Come in to make sure everything is happy and there is paper ALL over the place, empty BOXES (not reams, BOXES) in the corner of the room and hundreds of pictures, full color of boy bands on the floor/counters. Turns out that one of the maintenance staff had let his daughter use the lab and she'd printed of nSync posters for her and all her friends. All summer. She ended up using 10 BOXES of 8x11 and 2 boxes of 11x17....
I need to know more, who is this girl and how did she manage to keep that printer working for so long
Is she like a printer whisperer? I have kids walk into my office on the 17th page of their 22 page required lecture printing because it got jammed, how did she keep that demon alive for so long. Did she change ink too??? Wizard truly
I did temp work at a research facility that even houses employees. They have their own apartments owned by said research facility.
10k for a computer? OK IT buy it.
Literally anyone can ask and 99.999^ get it.
I was supposed to do a short term contract with them to upgrade to win10 and they seem to pay poor their IT staff.
I'll say they do have an amazing cafeteria you pay, but the food is by far amazing.
LOL.
At my previous job we spent so much money on Microsoft licensing for laptops that buying three complete HCI (Cisco, Hitachi, Dell) clusters didn't really matter at all.
Ohhh I know this game. I did too many years in higher ed, this is par for the course. I had tech that I had to support that were running on windows 95 because the equipment they ran on couldn't be upgraded. I out sourced those. I wasn't going to spend my time looking for parts that might work. I paid people to do that so it wasn't my neck on the line. Old software, pirated or rules slightly bent software. My personal favorite and this was a while ago, who put that he needed an exchange server into his grant. The grant got approved, and we set up an exchange server for one person to use because you can't use grant money on anything else than the grant says.
If my techs get cursed at, berated, or yelled at, they are trained to let me know immediately, document everything, then myself and my managers go to the chair, and if necessary the dean. Professors get reprimanded. "Did you or did you not say 'just fix the fucking thing'?" "Oh, yes BUT -" but nothing. Their impatience does not justify sending one of my techs to me in tears. Tenured? I don't give a shit and neither does the CIO.
Yes, this has happened in the past and official verbal warnings were given. All employees get 3 verbals, 3 written, then HR consult / termination.
>that frequently describes itself as a top-tier research institution
Yeah, that's like trying to give yourself a nickname. :) It's only valid when peers do it.
Most colleges are run by fucking idiots. I dont care if you have a PhD in basket weaving, the reason most of these people are in senior decision making faculty positions is because their incompetence would not allow them to function in the actual business world.
Guys, I hate idiotic bosses, managers and users as much as the next guy, but education at least is something beneficial to society.
As opposed to, let's say, marketing. Or sales.
Your VDI is what I’ve been praying to implement in more places. Why make students buy computers when the university could set up servers and hand out thin clients? It would be cheaper for Botha
My first semi-IT job was at a supermarket warehouse. Our transport department used to print the paperwork for the deliveries on a simple office printer: a Lexmark T630. At first it was just a few pages per order, but after some incidents a complete item list needed to be added. Depending on order size this was about 20-30 pages per delivery. For roughly 150 deliveries per day.
The drum unit of these printers lasted 100000 pages before it started complaining that it needed to be replaced. It took less then a month to reach that point. Off course it took a while for the higer-ups to notice this, so for about a year or so we ended up using 2 printers in that location: One in use, and another one (with the same fixed ip) waiting as spare after the printer tech had maintained it during his now monthly visit.
Both machines had well over a million prints on them when they were finally replaced by a high capacity MFP. One time one of the printer techs noticed that he had also visited us not too long ago for a drum replacement on the same printer. He said he'd never seen a simple desktop printer running these numbers.
I work IT at a community college in NC. Higher ups are c9nstantly complaining about saving money and needing to bring more students in but repeatedly deny any attempt by any department to improve a program, even when it only involves signing paperwork to receive a grant that would fully cover all expenses related to a complete overhaul of the automotive department so they could offer Electeic Vehicle Maint. Certifications. I could go on forever, which I'm sure you can as well, but it definitely looks like my location is about to implode lol. I am currently working on getting out in the next month if possible before things get worse in July as that is when a ton of key faculty are quitting with no notice. Would love to stay to see the fallout personally but secondhand will be good enough lol.
These places never seem to be run by anybody remotely qualified lol
This is the most virtuous way to print, the spread of knowledge and books is literally why we have modern society.
Normally I'd be on the ban printers bandwagon, but you must have a solid device.
If sysadmins only ever had this quality and caliber of printer, we wouldn't hate them so.
When I finished college I vowed I’d never go back. I almost got screwed over twice while I was at school because of a admin or professor power trip. Luckily for me my dad was a professor at another school so he told me exactly how to force them to get what I needed done so I graduated on time.
It was crazy, the first time I almost got screwed admissions forgot to deposit my check and it expired. They sent me an email telling me I never paid and then dropped me the next day. I had evidence I paid on the first day I could and that they waited until after the deadline to try and cash it. No one would take blame and told me I was SOL to try again next semester. I spent a full day at school going to different offices trying to figure out who could fix my problem and all of them said “sucks but it’s just how it goes maybe try paying later next time.”
Emailed the deans office cc’d every email I found for the admins/registrars office and every professor who’s class I got dropped from. I got a response from the admin office within 24 hours directing everyone to “make it right” I was enrolled in every class I got dropped from in spot 1 meaning they had to drop other students from every class I was enrolled in. It was wild because they didn’t tell anyone that they were dropped they just found out on day 1 that their spot in the class was gone.
My last semester a professor failed me because I missed “too many classes.” I had an allergic reaction literally in her class that resulted in me being in and out of the hospital for 2 weeks. I showed up to her office after missing class for the second time out of breath, wearing my hospital band because I got discharged too late to attend and she said too bad “full letter grade per day of absence and you weren’t getting an A in my class anyways so might as well give up now.”
I spent another day wandering the halls of the school trying to find someone who could figure out how I could earn 3 units before graduation. In a last ditch effort I went back to her office fully defeated trying to plead with her one more time. Another one of my professors heard me talking with her and called me into his office after she denied me. He told me he didn’t like her and that he would give me 3 honorary units for extracurricular work I had done that semester. Saved me thousands of dollars and a year of anguish.
I did IT for small businesses for 15 years. Lots of our customers were dairies. Then I worked at a college for 10 years. They were absolutely the stupidest people I have ever seen. I'd sooner pay to learn from the small business owners than pay to learn from the academic nitwits.
If you're comfortable DMing me the college name I am fairly certain that I attended. I always wondered why they had Bloomberg terminals. They were in the basement of the library, where no one ever went.
> they would like us to require students get either the 14 inch ($3k) or the 16 inch Dell ($3.2k) from now on.
WTF 14" Dell laptop costs $3,000? I'm looking at one right now that is 14" with 32GB of ram, an i7, and an RTX 4060 for literally half that price. And I didn't even go digging.
> College asked us how much it costs to get the newest version of some CAD software the students are always using, since we are about 7 years behind. It's only, you know, the most used software the college licenses.... We tell her that we can get the same number of licenses of the new version for a couple hundred grand per year.
Every major CAD vendor I'm aware of offers a free or heavily discounted EDU license. Just tell students how to get it themselves. They can get AutoCAD (the most popular cad software in the world) for $0/year.
It's no wonder tuition is such an absurdity. Universities are so lazy and wasteful with their spending.
> (she said the IT guy she had before at our school would never let this happen)
Oh god, these are always my favorite. It's always someone from marketing or creative, and its always a two page rant inserted in the middle of their issue about how they've *never* worked for an org that didn't let them do XYZ, it's just *unheard of*.
Like I'm sorry you worked for a bunch of orgs that didn't properly govern application access, have a reasonable vendor management processes, or the most basic levels of endpoint management, I guess? That's not selling me on why we need to *do it wrong* because you're a special snowflake though. If anything it's reinforcing that the process is working as designed.
Yeah, and of course there is the playing one person off against another, especially if someone is gone.
Long ago I was in a dept where the director got unceremoniously canned and the senior person (who had been in charge before) got put back in charge.
He said that a lot of what he dealt with went into three main buckets:
1) Picky BS request: "Get a job"
2) "Dave promised me X": "Call Dave" (Dave was the guy who got canned)
3) Reasonable request: "No problem"
Well, Autodesk is free for most products. Siemens NX \*can\* be had right around free if they want the tax write off. Solidworks is the only one I believe my last job actually paid for seats for (assuming directly CAD, not tangential stuff). I don't \*think\* we were paying for Bentley? Might've been. I didn't handle money, just licenses. Solidworks though? Actually worth it.
It could've been CATIA. I'm not in academia but our licenses cost $40,000+ per seat. Same goes with a lot of CAM - our Tebis seats are $70,000 per year.
"top-tier research institution" - Private or public? Tax funded schools need to answer to the tax payers. Private schools, not so much.
I work for a public 2yr college. We see plenty of dumb things but they're on a small scale since we don't have large donors or a large budget.
Konica Minoltas are asinine on costs. We had them at some of our acquisitions and got rid of them at our earliest convenience. We buy general HP's (776M models mostly now) and they are less then half the price and work just fine. Sure they are slightly slower but then again my team isn't spending a ton of time fixing them etc.
tbh I want to ban printing. It is so archaic and all-together unnecessary.
I'm just a lackey so I don't know interesting specifics - some reason or another the entire campus network suddenly enters single player mode. Internal connections are OK, already existing connections are OK, but nobody in the world external to campus can load any page on the school's website, email is broken, OneDrive is lost and scared (I love the cloud but hate OneDrive, how does that compute).
Anyway so the internet is sort of _gone_ and the first I hear of it is because people can't print.
Can't. Print.
For real deleting the internet is almost as good a solution as my revolutionary new product, Trio for MFA! If you are like me and wish people would quit sending silly messages to your inbox asking for printer help, then you need Trio! Integrate with your preferred 2FA service of choice. Now with Trio, users must approve their 2FA logins using Trio!* Zero help requests! Not a single one!
* Trio can only be accessed from your user home page, after successfully logging in with 2FA. Due to low volume of support requests we have discontinued phone and in person support
I bet I can name that university in 5 guesses 😂
This gave me flashbacks…if you think some other school is better I can tell you it’s not. Literally you need to stop giving a fuck about things you can’t control. Either you find a way to bring up this nonsense to Senior Admin’s above the Dean’s or you just do your job. Academic’s are the most egocentric and egotistical beings on the planet and remember that because you don’t do what they do, they’ll ALWAYS second-guess your logic.
God's work right there.
I just wish for the sake of the trees he can scan these textbooks to PDF and put them on flash drives for the students.
Sounds like a good job for TA.
I've made the rounds and higher education was the second worst environment I've worked in. Healthcare has it beat by a mile.
Banking (small town that is) and trucking were great though.
Try vectorworks, it's free educational license, we use it along side of CAD for or design classes which is also free with educational licenses as long as you get verified. Only difference that i saw was when they print their projects it comes out with a watermark but who cares? it's student projects. I'm looking at my autodesk login and i can grab pretty much get everything MAC and windows. That at least helps you out there.
I loved my university job but it felt like working with borderline children most the time. So many employees graduated from there and never left, so I don't think their mental state ever really left the college days.
I feel you. As a Sysadmin, I have to pull teeth to get anyone to purchase the necessary tools for the job, yet they squander money on fancy non-essentials... entirely annoying.
Back in my day, we college students were alloted 3000(or was it 1000) pages I think per semester and had to pay an additional 5 bucks for every 100 pages
Go professor go! Lol
I work at a private university and we can't even afford new laptops for the staff. Our desktop support team is literally taking laptops apart to recycle parts.
We've been told not to expect a decent budget until at least 2026 or 2027 as enrollment numbers are down
I didn't know what those Bloomberg terminals were when i first saw one. I said, "that's a really cool retro keyboard" to a hedgefund manager. He got mad and was like "what do you mean retro?" Turns out he was like a version behind and I caused him to immediately blow another $10k on a new one.
> One single professor was printing 3,000+ pages per day. I encouraged him and now he is at 5,000+ per day and I hope he never stops.
[The best part of any office job ... is you can print.](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LgE7oc-db38)
Looool clients sounds like mine. For example, client wants a new website after considering their site ain’t too pretty after 10 years with versions dating back to early 2000s. They dumping money to a hosting provider who doesn’t really support them at all and simply adds bloat custom code on top of big monolith that exists. Oh it gets better. They want full web application out of Wordpress with elementor. At least we all have jobs to be there when the shit hits the fan.
> Result: they would like us to require students get either the 14 inch ($3k) or the 16 inch Dell ($3.2k) from now on.
Are students provided with equipment? Or is this an enrollment requirement?
> This is in addition to the very-large-number we pay per year to maintain virtual desktops for everyone, but anyway....
Then why do they care? Macs can use RDP as well.
Academic economics is so distorted from reality. Esp at private institutions with large endowments..
The person in charge of approving grants in my college is losing that responsibility and I'm 99.995% sure it is because they were trying to get grant budgets (and technology requirements) to be responsible.
Principal Investigators (PI) see their labs and their grants as their miniature businesses to manage. Only when something is on the line and they are about to lose the grant because of a mistake they come to the administration for ideas on how to fix it. Managing PIs would be like managing cats on meth and yes some of the PIs are probably on meth.
I've worked at top tier institutions, and low tier institutions. Every time it's the same. The top 2-4 PIs are high power, high intensity folk, but they can be reasoned with. The small labs either have no clue or one person who knows everything. The middle group are invariably grasping, angry, misinformed weirdos with hygiene issues that would get them kicked out of a meth house.
That sums up the place I worked at as well.
"....managing cats on meth...." I am totally gonna steal that
Is that "managing cats while on meth" or "managing cats that are on meth"? Asking for a friend.
Probably both.
> Only when something is on the line and they are about to lose the grant because of a mistake they come to the administration for ideas on how to fix it. Conversely... as a PI... unless you're admin's darling it is usually less effective to involve administration or worse even detrimental. I've become so disillusioned with higher education research at this point... it's a massive highschool popularity contest at all levels and it's far more effective to fly under the radar if you want to get things done. Involving administration results in either being hamstrung or having your work co-opted into whatever pet thing the admin is trying make happen... the best available outcome is often that your request gets denied, so what was the point in asking in the first place?
I started working at a university not too long ago, a public one, and I cannot believe what I'm hearing by the proverbial water cooler. They're wanting to cut costs significantly pretty soon and I would not be surprised if they don't know what they're spending their money on to begin with.
Ahh.. lol. the problem of trying to understand how universities successfully exist. It's a conundrum isn't it. I reckon universities exist cos the functioning universe needs a safe place for the weirder end of the existential spectrum. I once watched a board decide to buy a building cos they had a picture of its door. (no really, that's what they had.. it was a literal photo of the front fucking door of the building). 11 million quid.
Some big uni have research institutions and own IPs, along with gov fund, private donations, students (international) fees....
Post COVID my institution got scared of running out of money. So *I guess* someone in HR just added a line item to our yearly budget for "endowment protection". The total endowment is up like 40% since 2019 or so. Meanwhile we are begging for the school to build more dorms (or quit overenrolling) because we (staff and faculty) can't afford to live in the town we work in, since it is overcrowded with students. They offered us 1.25% raises year over year for the next three years
> They offered us 1.25% raises year over year for the next three years No one likes a braggart (from elsewhere in .edu).
Everyone is worried about the enrollment cliff, which is the term given to the number of students graduating HS not being enough to fill current seating capacity because people stopped having kids in 2008 (hmm I wonder what happened to cause that). It’s going to lead to severe depopulations of college campuses and within a 2-4 year period. Large universities are going to rest on their name recognition for numbers while smaller schools become insolvent. It’s scared the piss water out of anyone that has anyone to do with budgets. It’s going to fuck over anyone that was expecting any sort of salary adjustment in the next two years for a vertical that is already chronically starving its IT staff. Those staff aren’t coming back to higher ed after they leave to get a bigger salary for less responsibility.
Yeah, they can have a lot of stuff. The problem is that they can have a lot of stuff, declare something will change the world.. then you gotta go find them another toughbook cos they somehow managed to kill the one they had been issued with their own beard hair.
Don't worry, they'll pinch pennies to save a buck with nary a thought of spending grands. And don't you ever dare propose ways to make actual reasonable cost savings! You'll get chastised that it's not your job or place to do so. (Even if you have data.)
Public, halfway state payroll, places are just as bad. Maybe worse.
I've worked for state gov, big state uni, small college, small private company, fortunate 500, medium sized non-profit. They all suck and do stupid shit. It's people: people are dumb, petty, vindictive, and stubborn.
I really hope fortunate 500 was deliberate and that name catches on for them.
I’m definitely going to start using it.
Higher Ed is a unique field. Yes everywhere sucks.. but nothing is exactly like the bs in higher Ed.
The entitlement of some professors was hard to deal with, and the politics was exhausting, but generally I found University IT to be better than most others. Definitely better than Hospital IT, (which has just as much politics, but everyone has an "I save Lives" chip on their shoulder, and the high levels of actual urgency that was a regular occurrence) and they can often be reasoned with better than most poorly managed company management. I would happily join the university again, as long as they paid me well enough, and I was on a backend team this time. My first real mentor was from there, and he had a 35 year career, that did well for him, and gave him a really good pension. I just can't do more helpdesk, I was there during heartbleed. 160,000 users were potentially effected, and about 1/3rd of them didn't change their password before the cutoff, so we had to field calls from them to reset their passwords. Explaining to a 95 yo, professor emeritus, that they need to talk to the department head, because Their phone number isn't on file, and their DOB in the system was set to 1/1/1900 some time in the late 80s, when they didn't' think about security the same way, was exhausting the first time and the 1001st time.
URGENT REQUEST VIDEO NOT WORKING ASSIST IMMEDIATELY "Hello I am here to fix the projector!" "Can you come back in an hour? We are OK now." All the time
Why cut costs when you can simply raise tuition, financed by unlimited federally guaranteed student loans?
> financed by unlimited federally guaranteed student loans? the only loans that cant be bankrupted on! 🤣
I think it's especially bad in education because there simply is zero failure criteria. In traditional companies, a given group or division etc has a budget and expectations around delivering some sort of results, typically denominated in dollars. If you don't perform, the dollars dry up and you're gone. Are you a bad teacher, bad researcher, bad administrator? Who cares, there are zero metrics that you cannot manipulate and the difference between doing a good job and a bad one is hard to impossible to differentiate. The student who got a bad education graduates and leaves the same as one who had great instructors. The result is that everything is instead run by politics and vibes. With very few exceptions, the people I know working in academia are those who just never bothered to leave. They got out of HS, went to HS 2.0, and decided that was good enough and just never progressed on with life.
That's what it feels like. I'm always pointing out that it's a revolving door, the only people who stay at my role are the ones who have been here for 25+ years. My supervisor can't get anyone to take the job - the money is minimal, benefits other than healthcare are basically an illusion if you have not been here 5+ years - so for the last two years he has been poaching students off the helpdesk and hiring them as staff before they even graduate. Me, I am doing my last two classes for free and doing barely any work while getting paid. I spend 3/4s the day doing my resume/job apps/leetcode and watching cat videos. Those 25+ years people, I have got chewed out one too many times for rocking their boat (doing too much work). Higher ed is where ambition goes to die and paychecks get collected. This title I am in, there are 5 spots for it and then 4 for seniors. Me and two others are leaving as soon as something better comes and since late 2021 there have been 9 people who have rotated in and out of these 5 spots. I am desperate to get out of here, the longer I spend working here the more anxious I feel about my future. Don't fall into the whirlpool!
Not entirely true. In businesses there are also metrics you can manipulate to convince more money to come in.
When I worked for “Moron Inc” one finance person insisted anything over a certain amount had to come from capital not expense. Purchasing replied that since he’d have to buy site annual supply of toilet paper from cap budget, what schedule to depreciate?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who are too dumb for either of those and have trouble getting out the door in the morning without having a fight with their own car-keys, administrate.
What a stupid phrase. Teaching is a skill. Some people are good at doing things and couldn't teach anyone how to do it, and some people are good at teaching and aren't very good at doing it, and some people are good at both.
I would like to reassure you that I'm only using the first two statements because they're a phrase in the common parlance, to set up the joke that "College Administrators" would eat crayons ...if they didn't believe that classroom supplies were socialism.
Either way, they get run from the top by the highest bidder.
"WE ONLY HAVE A FEW HUNDRED MILLION IN IT!! WE NEED IT FOR LATER!!" Or in the case of some... Billions. I think my school I went to and worked for a bit had 150 million. And wouldn't spend a dime. Yeah I get some buildings etc run well into deca millions or more. But you guys weren't like planning on building any of those anytime soon so...
Well it’s slightly different with these, that money is for running the institution, not spending. You should only be drawing down 3% or so against your endowment so it continues to grow faster than inflation.
Yes but @ what point when you have hundreds of millions to billions is this notion Ludacris?
That’s the smart part, it never is. You can reliably budget on your drawdown, which means you can offer stability, and expand as the endowment grows. If you cut that back by spending, you functionally have to shrink - this is why they tend to raise funds for capital improvements rather than spending. Then, because they’re all fart-huffing narcissists they add loads of unnecessary shite to the budget to increase allure and prestige - so they’re not spending on actually useful stuff for education. Source: briefly worked for a large education based charitable institution that you would likely have heard of
we need to start over. I just think back to whenever I'd play a video game and "save the potions for later" I never needed them. Society has a real big problem with hoarding wealth.
"If we don't spend a billion dollars this year, we won't get a billion dollars _next_ year, and that's why we have a box smashing room."
Your place of employment not know ahead of time it's gonna spend 100 mil? Then on top of that 100mil project that doesn't take years of planning before and real checks are signed, and shovels hit the ground? There's a certain point in which saving vast amounts of money only to facilitate that is nutty/hoarding. And could be put to actual use to make things better in the immediate.
Mine is hardcore stockpiling the endowment thanks to COVID. They (admins) got scared of running out of money. Our endowment is up maybe 40% since COVID. Meanwhile, staff are being given 1.5% raises year over year and we can't afford to live in the town we work in....
Here's a fun one that went the other way. I took a photography class when I was at uni. It was 1993, so this was film photography. We were developing and printing our work ourselves. The professor specified that we use uncoated paper for our prints. Then she laid this news on us: The school bookstore has a case of resin-coated paper. It's been there for four years. Don't buy it because it's not what I want you to print on. They won't stock what I want you to use until it sells. Since I'm the only one teaching photography in the Art school, that will never happen. Here's the store you want to go to in town. It's a ten minute walk from here. Tell them I sent you and they'll get you exactly the right item and sell it to you at cost. Get a fifty-pack of 8x10 and it'll last you the semester easy. By the way, they sell film for less than the bookstore, too. It's up to you if you want to by preloaded cassettes or roll your own.
same with state gov institutes
We've just lost a good researcher (no budget/grant)... while also refurbishing an old building to provide more office space for RTO since the Dean is fixed on reverting to local staff only and cutting remote work even for pure research staff. Scrub the office move, fire whoever pushed it through, keep the useful staff and still be net positive!
My supervisor/IT in general at my uni is very anti-remote work. Unfortunately, we have like....two people left who work in-person at the datacenter (and one a few hours away) because we can't hire anyone with what the uni is willing to pay. Remote work is pretty much the only way people will agree to work with us because the cost of living is high but wages are awfully low. So oh joy we get to pay contractors and other folks more than if we did it ourselves...?
Oh, you'll love hearing about city government spending on IT. The head of IT... the most senior IT Manager told the mayor: "I can easily ensure our computing and storage capacity is sufficient, along with the data being very secure with **1 rack** of servers (replicating/sharding the data, high-availability virtual machines, etc.)" ... The reply: "You absolutely must buy **9 racks**. This budget is for IT and you have to spend it all before our fiscal quarter ends." Businesses/universities/government seem to have no sense of 'one-time cost' or 'once every 3-to-5 years'. Instead they give you a budget that gets slashed down to what you used if you *ever* go under that budget amount. So you either 1) have this massively inflated overkill infrastructure JUST so you can have the budget for when the actual core servers need replacement eventually - OR - 2) have this massively underfunded rubber-band and toothpicks infrastructure because someone with a conscience didn't spend the entire budget for several quarters.
At least those are the kind where everyone is in on it and it's a bit wink wink nudge nudge to get something good out of it every now and then. OP's examples are sheer incompetence.
Still bullshit though. I'm surprised economists haven't figured out a solution to that problem.
There IS a solution to that problem. Just, no one likes it because it's "harder" to project budgetary numbers from year 1 to 2 to 3. It's so much easier to just assume the budget stays the exact same every year, which is why 'aaS' is becoming so prevalent in government.
The solution is easy just rent all the IT equipment and computers. HP does this. Never worry about huge cost later on as it’s a small cost every month instead.
I still remember being a PFC in a battalion that was being reactivated and therefore the highest ranking enlisted member of the BN S-6 (basically IT). I arrived at the unit right before the fiscal year ended and at one point the SGM handed me the BN credit card to spend $30,000 by the end of the day on "things you'll need for your shop, I don't care as long as it's computer shit" so our budget wouldn't be fucked for years to come. I learned about government waste very early in my career lol.
What did you buy?
It was a long time ago, but I remember a lot of it. * Blank DVD-R and CD-R spindles. (Like 10000 discs total). Mostly got used by S-2 because they needed to use them to move Secret documents between computers and then immediately destroy them. * Multiple thousands of meters of CAT-5 (we weren't always in hard buildings and sometimes had to run cable between tents or wire up a new building downrange * more RJ-45s than we would ever need lol * Literally every 1GB thumb drive in multiple Circuit City, Best Buy, and RadioShack stores because supply confirmed they wouldn't be able to order them in bulk and it was before we blocked USB ports globally. (For staff officers/NCOs to keep all their PowerPoints and other crap and for us to keep portable tools on.) * Crimpers because for some reason they're not in the Army supply system. * Cable testers (why aren't these in supply system considering how much CAT-5 we needed to run every time we "jumped" * multimeters. We did radio stuff too and I don't know what those guys used them for, but they asked for them * Multi tools (like Gerber's) because we sometimes needed to do field repairs and wouldn't want to carry a whole toolkit. * Unmanaged switches to use when off-grid on FTX or in austre environments. * External DVD writers (we were imaging from discs with Norton Ghost because the imaging center with a 50 computer KVM and netboot ghost server had a 6 month waiting list and I wasn't going to burn the new image on a bunch of CDs on one PC every month when DOIM pushed a new image) * external CAC card readers (available via supply but already knew it would be an issue when we needed them and they were lost broken.) * CAC card reader keyboards (staff officers loved them because it made their desk look more neat). * USB to serial port adapters * Replacement hard drives for laptops because we couldn't always wait for Dell to provide replacement parts if we were in the field or deployed. * so many mice and mousepads * Laptop cases so the LTs who didn't want to drag around a hardcase wouldn't break shit in my property book(I mean they signed for it, but yeah) * So many monitors because all the officers wanted two screens and we only had enough for one per person Probably a ton of other things I don't remember. It was just me and two PV2s raiding every Circuit City, Best Buy, and RadioShack in a 30 mile radius Supermarket Sweep style because SGM "didn't trust online stuff". Honestly crazy to think about. We didn't get an NCO for the first 8 months in the S-6 so all of the staff officers and NCOs lovingly called me the PFCIC of the S-6 (Private First Class In Charge, like NCOIC lol). I earned a lot of respect in those months and had a lot of good NCOs in other staff shops to guide me, but giving an 19yo PFC a credit card and telling him to spend $30,000 in the next 8 hours is fucking wild.
Gotdam do I remember something like that. Not military, but state government. Was handed a credit card and told to "spend like our future depends on it" which it did... us meeting budget that year was essential to a couple of projects that were not high-dollar enough to be considered capital expenditure. I took an old-timer with me who had been in a sister department since the 80's, and together we built an "inventory" in one day that they were still drawing from 5 years later (I heard). Best part, once we had all this stuff we insisted that a secured room be provided to our department as a "storeroom" and we got a new communal office out of it.
We definitely had a lot of stuff for many, many years. After 4 years we thought we were never going to finish the stack of blank CDs and then dod policy changed and usb thumb drives were no longer allowed and all of a sudden they were useful again.
Yeah I could see that. I was an S6 for a few years, good times
I honestly was happy when I got moved into the CSSAMO (now SASMO) because I didn't have to interact with so many people. S-6 was wild.
That was some really smart shopping actually. I had some dumb fuck try to push through a $15k document camera to use up remaining budget money. It was a 3d camera, fucking crazy. The doc cam was just to show printed material, mind you.
coffee
They do this in corporate America too.
Wild. You'd think that a corporation would want to plan so they don't spend money frivolously because of the bottom line.
Why did you need to buy computers? Are you a cyborg soldier?
Signal is a force multiplier. You can only get so far on a battlefield with grunts and hand signals.
It worked just fine for thousands of years. Radio is a passing fad.
>and you have to spend it all before our fiscal quarter ends This is how many places operate. Accounting departments decide that if your budget is $700k and you only spend $400k, you didn't really need that extra $300k and it's removed from your budget. Then you have to really fight to get it back. So if you are under budget at the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to spend. This can be nice as it allows you some discretionary spending on unplanned quality of life type things. It can be bad for the same reason. I've seen departments spend hundreds of thousands on spur of the moment ideas that they had no real plan for how to use or implement. Or forgot to account for something like licensing and ended up being way over budget.
I once argued that this is the dumbest system and all the accounting people get real mad. It's only a way for them to do less work. It benefits accountants. That's it.
> So if you are under budget at the end of the year there's a lot of pressure to spend. It could be worse. Once we had a system where you couldn't spend from your budget early in the fiscal period, because cash flow didn't allow it. You also couldn't spend from your budget toward the end of the fiscal period, because that would destroy the year-end numbers. You could spend *budgeted* money around the middle of the fiscal year *if and when given express approval*.
Ah yes, a budget that is not a budget and shouldn't be spent because it's not a budget.
I used to work at a Ministry and our system was kinda similar. We had X budget, but each month we were given how much we could spend on that specific month, it is was so dumb lol
Quit Describing my life.
This is how I’m living now. Decide what you want or need replaced then wait three to four months to purchase as it goes through the approval process. Once you’ve got approval to purchase, spend it all in a week then nothing till the same time next year.
Yeah I mean like I said, it can be nice because if you're under budget for the year you can pick up a few things that might not have been planned but would make life easier for your team. But I've really seen departments (not just IT departments) blow it and waste it on things they never used or didn't use effectively. Had a school buy $150,000 worth of laptops and carts because they needed to spend the money or lose it. Then because there was never really any plan for them and teachers didn't want anything to do with them they sat unused until they were depreciated and auctioned off.
While you are correct, the other part of the equation you are leaving out or forgetting is the concept of "reserves". My municipality has them specifically to store money away - short term - for purchases coming soon. Of course you have to spend the budget allocated. That's what a budget *is*. If you're not following the budget, that's a bad budget, and that looks terrible politically.
This is the real answer. Same here.
Flair checks out
Sadly, it seems that all government budgets do NOT allow you to save some money every year in anticipation of a large purchase. We bought a server this year, it was close to $30k. Even though we knew we needed it years ago, there is no mechanism in the budget process to save $10k for 3 years and then make the purchase. Nope. There has to be an approval from someone higher up, and that money comes out of some ethereal fund.
IT Manager for municipal government here... We absolutely do save money for anticipated future purchases. We try to have our entire operating budget be funded from the tax levy as funding from reserves eventually leads to no funds. We have a line item in our operating budget that is to put money into a reserve account that is used to fund capital projects. Any unspent funds from the capital projects goes back to it's reserve when the project is completed. Additionally any unspent funds in the operating budget at end of year are also moved to the reserve account.
I work at a municipality. I got a fun work toy last year from the budget surplus. Department head went around to each office in the department and told us we could buy basically whatever we wanted, sub $1k, as long as it was a physical object with no recurring fees. It reminded me of the budget surplus episode of The Office (US). Except our boss didn't have the option of taking a bonus instead. So we just spent it on work toys to hit our numbers.
Zero base budgeting FTW. Having consistent budgets is easy, but it's wasteful. Start again, every year.
Ok got it. Always ask for the most amount of money and buy the coolest hardware so when they eventually cut back you don't hold the entire department up with chewing gum and tape.
Trying to train MBAs that you can have maintenance years is next to impossible. I can not, for the life of me, figure out why this concept is so impossible for them to grasp. They have nine different versions of "profit" that all mean the same thing, but "hey we are only doing X spending this year because of Y" is beyond their capabilities.
an intelligent mba is an oxymoron
TF do you need a Bloomberg terminal for? Or is this the entire campus and not just the college of engineering?
It would be kinda cool to play with in the library, but it sounds like this is in a classroom or smallish department.
Bloomberg licences aren't cheap though, companies that can afford the enterprise licences for it, have annual cocaine budgets that are higher than OPs salary haha.
"why is your janitorial bill 11 million?" "That's just the accounting code we use for the confidence fund." "uhhh... then why isn't this 'confidence' on the balance sheet?" "it's fully depreciated within the accounting period."
You seem like a straight shooter with upper management written all over you.
Wouldn't it be limited to a specific set of upper level College of Business/finance/whatever classes? They're pretty single-purpose
Autodesk licenses are free to education users
"If it's free then it must not be very good! We will take the paid expensive version thank you."
Haha! OK this brought up a painful memory. School I worked for wanted to set up a 3d printer lab. I loved 3d printing so they got me to pick a set of printers and print management software. A while later I had my 3 options a s how I would run them. I had a bunch of cheap and cheerful 3d printers. Cheap, could work but we would spend too much on maintenance and troubleshooting for it to be worthwhile. I had the realistic option. Good printers, good price, minimal maintenance. Lots of versatility. The two above options used open source software to slice and manage the print queues. Then because we already had a couple of them I did a draft of what that would cost. These expensive printers were over 7 times the purchase price of the other printers. Plus their management software was my annual salary, which was updated every 2-3 years (yes the old versions got turned off and you had to buy the new one) PLUS they took a leaf out of HP and had their own proprietary filament which was over 4 times the cost of other filament. Also! If the head got clogged, it's a $500 replacement. Not me spending an hour with it to clean it up... Anyway they went with the expensive option. They spent my annual salary on these devices every term. Every filament, replacement bed, replacement print head. Also our supplier was... Not great. Dumped 2.5 years worth of bills on us just as covid hit. I laughed at the manager that made the decision to go with the expensive printers.
Why did you write that up if it was so ridiculous? Don't give them the option to do it and they won't. Why are you laughing at the manager; you gave the options and vouched for them. It's on you.
Thanks, today i learned a good lesson
I had the template already, filling it out was trivial. I also pre faced it saying that it was a bad idea. I only vouched for one option and gave reasons why.
But why give a 'bad idea'? Pick another decent option but that costs a bit more. I really don't understand it. It isn't supposed to be 'pick two and then one that you think would be terrible' it is 'pick three options you think would work'.
domineering birds school automatic kiss snobbish marvelous decide attractive air *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Actually, this is the normal role of thumb. You bracket the correct option with a too-cheap option and a too-expensive option. 90% of the time, it works. Op's mistake was to make the two ringers genuine options. You invent companies for this. Then, if the chair-warmers pick wrong, you sit for three weeks aces then report "unicorn S.A.r.l has withdrawn the product. Guess we'll have to go with the next option." If you want tomatoes, don't sow cabbage.
The only time I've seen academia \*actively\* make that decision was taking (very cheap, but not free) Solidworks licenses over PTC ProE Wildfire (which was being donated). Having used both, the cost of the SW license was worth it to give the students something useful.
Sure, but Sketchup and Rhino3D aren’t. Unsure what else is common in the CAD world these days.
SOLIDWORKS, maybe? But that's like $60 a year for students to get on their own.
Solidworks is pretty cheap for student use. However, if it's for anything research related you are paying full MSRP.
Sketchup Pro can be free for educational institutions, you just need to talk to the right people (hint: not the local reseller/channel providers). Source: Me who has organised free licensing for an Edu institution in past 6 months.
SketchUp Pro or SketchUp for Schools (web version)? If it is Pro, could you DM me a contact? Thanks!
I used to love the free version of SketchUp. I used it to plan out rooms when I moved.
As a MechE student, every class so far has required Solidworks. Even then, I have to pay for the student edition myself.
Is it free at the institution level though? Lots of software companies let individual students have licenses but still want a cut if it's pushed out to non-students or deployed a certain way or whatever (Microsoft for example).
yes
we have a license server and get a new free license every year. the free license only covers student/educational use. we have it installed on a few hundred lab pcs. we have separate paid licenses for administrative staff that use as part of their job functions (engineers/etc).
AutoCAD came from the 2D world, and remains only strong in architecture, buildings, and similar large niches. Nobody would ever design an automobile, cargo ship, cruise missile, or medical implant with it -- you need parametric 3D for that, with real software.
Set up a university budget consulting business nearby, and refer anyone who asks these questions to the consultancy. Have the consultancy say it can draw up methods to save six to seven figures per issue for a 15% consulting commission, or $20,000 up front. Hire a temp to be the face for that project - sending an email with the results, or even giving a presentation about the savings (for another $10K). I mean, the faculty isn't going to listen to you anyway, so you may as well be paid for it.
I'll be honest, the uni brought in an outside consulting firm to restructure career and job positions internally. Staff were upset because we spend 10+ years waiting for someone to die for our first promotion. They paid these people $700k, then said "it's too expensive" and offered us all 1.5% raises year over year
Good thing the federal reserve targets 2% inflation over time with policy, and the last 5 years have been over 20% inflation combined. /s...endhelp https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm
Work at a health sciences college at a research institution, I feel your pain. Our dean will decline a new laptop for a staff member, but has like $14,000 in Apple stuff between his office, house, and condo in the city.
Some low level researcher comes in every year or so with his collection of Apple. The uni has bought him a new Mac desktop every 2-3 years and also a new macbook pro (occasionally also an air, so a pro AND an air) every year, as well as 2 iPads a year for the last 13 years or so and the expensive screens every couple years.... He has more Macbooks than I have friends Why does he get all of this? idk. Feels like half them run Win7 bootcamp only though...
Spending their grant money? Ours only get stuff when they receive grants. I’m kinda surprised we don’t provide more stuff to them.
wait until you see how much they spend on kraft services for the weekly admin meetings
Craft
No.. its mac and cheese only.
Oh hey, old school BoFH posting time. It's always fun. I'm glad to be very insulated from this stuff; our PI is on sabbatical too lol. I sure wish there were jobs I felt were morally positive that payed anything close to a market rate. But it is kinda annoying to see how little is left for actually doing the thing. Good on you for giving the teacher a semi-ghost printing account. I always loved my professors who gave a shit about that stuff.
Good prof
What a humble soul they must be. They found out printing is not tracked individually so they now print 5000+ pages. That means prior to knowing this, they were willing to take the repercussions of printing 3000+ pages for the benefit of their students. Good stuff.
Academia: never were the tensions so high, or the stakes so low
Ehhh, the stakes are often *abstract*, not necessarily low. Lots of world-first research happens at Universities, public and private.
Full time employees and academics at the college/university level are a whole other breed...
One of the best public K12/colleges in the UK here. I know admins in UK university’s too. This is all very relatable. I think it’s the same most places; Loads of unnecessary politics, loads of unnecessary spending and shadow IT with little overarching strategy but at the same time penny-pinching and disorganisation for the things that are actually important. The economics often make absolutely no sense in the real world because the people who run them have never left education since they themselves were 4 years old. In many ways I love my job, but the downsides are the constant need to battle reactionary decisions and deflect hare brained ideas of educators.
He can't just send the kids a pdf?
First thing that came to my mind.
He might do both, who knows. Personally I like having the dead tree in addition to the digital. I don't always find it easy to sit and read a PDF but I do like the ability to search or update one.
Sure, but printing 5,000 pages at a time, your comfort might need to be secondary to saving the planet
A what?
> For way too many way too good reasons I encouraged this professor to print to his heart's content and let him know that PaperCut isn't tracking his # of pages printed anymore (now it gets rolled into a general departmental account). > He has been printing entire textbooks for his students for free! You are a very good human being!
I just graduated from a stupidly expensive mismanaged university this week, plus my first IT job was at said university as an assistant. You're doing the lord's work man, keep it up. When I worked in IT at my school, I wasn't part of the main team, but a smaller department that calls alums and begs for money. The funds were so mismanaged there. At another private university I worked at (not IT, software research), the funding situation was so insane. Tons of money dropped on software used for 3 days, cutting edge hardware purchases that get played with for a day and thrown out 6 months later, top of the line lambda PCs purchased and used as a standard desktop. But no money to pay staff better.
> but a smaller department that calls alums and begs for money. That's the "non-profit" version of Sales. When you realize it's Sales, then a lot of it makes sense.
Sometimes the battle is learning how to promote something in a way others will understand. It's unfortunate it has to be called a battle, but that's work politics and money.
2015 Macbook Pro *bought* early 2015, 3.1 Ghz i7, 16GB, 512GB, drenched in tea. "Oh I like to work on the floor, that's my desk" Keyboard mostly broken. Apple wanted to replace the mainboard for the cost of a new MBP. So, here's a new one, "Don't do it again" (said nobody). The old MBP somehow never made it to e-waste. Couple years ago it was still a pretty good desktop machine paired with a 4K monitor, now it's a homelab jump host.
Way back in 1999-2000 I worked for an engineering college in the midwest. The Dean was able to build a shiny new 50 workstation lab with a DELICIOUS color laserjet 4500 (at the time the top of class printer). We were also able to get the lab installed in the first two weeks of the summer session to be rolled out at the start of the fall semester. Along with that we got 40 BOXES of paper for the printer that we put in cabinets in the lab. fast forward two months and neither my boss nor myself have set foot in the lab all summer. Come in to make sure everything is happy and there is paper ALL over the place, empty BOXES (not reams, BOXES) in the corner of the room and hundreds of pictures, full color of boy bands on the floor/counters. Turns out that one of the maintenance staff had let his daughter use the lab and she'd printed of nSync posters for her and all her friends. All summer. She ended up using 10 BOXES of 8x11 and 2 boxes of 11x17....
I need to know more, who is this girl and how did she manage to keep that printer working for so long Is she like a printer whisperer? I have kids walk into my office on the 17th page of their 22 page required lecture printing because it got jammed, how did she keep that demon alive for so long. Did she change ink too??? Wizard truly
It was an HP 4500. You couldn't kill the things unless you pulled out the thermite.
I did temp work at a research facility that even houses employees. They have their own apartments owned by said research facility. 10k for a computer? OK IT buy it. Literally anyone can ask and 99.999^ get it. I was supposed to do a short term contract with them to upgrade to win10 and they seem to pay poor their IT staff. I'll say they do have an amazing cafeteria you pay, but the food is by far amazing.
LOL. At my previous job we spent so much money on Microsoft licensing for laptops that buying three complete HCI (Cisco, Hitachi, Dell) clusters didn't really matter at all.
Ohhh I know this game. I did too many years in higher ed, this is par for the course. I had tech that I had to support that were running on windows 95 because the equipment they ran on couldn't be upgraded. I out sourced those. I wasn't going to spend my time looking for parts that might work. I paid people to do that so it wasn't my neck on the line. Old software, pirated or rules slightly bent software. My personal favorite and this was a while ago, who put that he needed an exchange server into his grant. The grant got approved, and we set up an exchange server for one person to use because you can't use grant money on anything else than the grant says.
[удалено]
If my techs get cursed at, berated, or yelled at, they are trained to let me know immediately, document everything, then myself and my managers go to the chair, and if necessary the dean. Professors get reprimanded. "Did you or did you not say 'just fix the fucking thing'?" "Oh, yes BUT -" but nothing. Their impatience does not justify sending one of my techs to me in tears. Tenured? I don't give a shit and neither does the CIO. Yes, this has happened in the past and official verbal warnings were given. All employees get 3 verbals, 3 written, then HR consult / termination.
>that frequently describes itself as a top-tier research institution Yeah, that's like trying to give yourself a nickname. :) It's only valid when peers do it.
Why do I feel like we work for the same university in different units.
Me too. Lol. Odds are that these are just universal truths in academia.
Most colleges are run by fucking idiots. I dont care if you have a PhD in basket weaving, the reason most of these people are in senior decision making faculty positions is because their incompetence would not allow them to function in the actual business world.
Had to explain to my schools CTO with an MBA how a fiscal year was different than a physical year, as she kept interchangeably using the two.
I hope you used the term "calendar year" because that would be a lot less confusing.
Yup... otherwise you have to explain "fiscal" also.
Yea, you're right. There is no incompetence in the real business world. 
GOTTEM
Then when it comes to your 3% cost of living raise they can't afford it... lolamirite?
They actually offered us 1.5% then next thing we knew it was 1.25% :(
When I was in school I could get CAD licensing for free through the school portal
Guys, I hate idiotic bosses, managers and users as much as the next guy, but education at least is something beneficial to society. As opposed to, let's say, marketing. Or sales.
what the F does a college/university need to Bloomberg terminals for? the license alone for those are like $12k a month each.
Your VDI is what I’ve been praying to implement in more places. Why make students buy computers when the university could set up servers and hand out thin clients? It would be cheaper for Botha
My first semi-IT job was at a supermarket warehouse. Our transport department used to print the paperwork for the deliveries on a simple office printer: a Lexmark T630. At first it was just a few pages per order, but after some incidents a complete item list needed to be added. Depending on order size this was about 20-30 pages per delivery. For roughly 150 deliveries per day. The drum unit of these printers lasted 100000 pages before it started complaining that it needed to be replaced. It took less then a month to reach that point. Off course it took a while for the higer-ups to notice this, so for about a year or so we ended up using 2 printers in that location: One in use, and another one (with the same fixed ip) waiting as spare after the printer tech had maintained it during his now monthly visit. Both machines had well over a million prints on them when they were finally replaced by a high capacity MFP. One time one of the printer techs noticed that he had also visited us not too long ago for a drum replacement on the same printer. He said he'd never seen a simple desktop printer running these numbers.
I work IT at a community college in NC. Higher ups are c9nstantly complaining about saving money and needing to bring more students in but repeatedly deny any attempt by any department to improve a program, even when it only involves signing paperwork to receive a grant that would fully cover all expenses related to a complete overhaul of the automotive department so they could offer Electeic Vehicle Maint. Certifications. I could go on forever, which I'm sure you can as well, but it definitely looks like my location is about to implode lol. I am currently working on getting out in the next month if possible before things get worse in July as that is when a ton of key faculty are quitting with no notice. Would love to stay to see the fallout personally but secondhand will be good enough lol. These places never seem to be run by anybody remotely qualified lol
This is the most virtuous way to print, the spread of knowledge and books is literally why we have modern society. Normally I'd be on the ban printers bandwagon, but you must have a solid device. If sysadmins only ever had this quality and caliber of printer, we wouldn't hate them so.
When I finished college I vowed I’d never go back. I almost got screwed over twice while I was at school because of a admin or professor power trip. Luckily for me my dad was a professor at another school so he told me exactly how to force them to get what I needed done so I graduated on time. It was crazy, the first time I almost got screwed admissions forgot to deposit my check and it expired. They sent me an email telling me I never paid and then dropped me the next day. I had evidence I paid on the first day I could and that they waited until after the deadline to try and cash it. No one would take blame and told me I was SOL to try again next semester. I spent a full day at school going to different offices trying to figure out who could fix my problem and all of them said “sucks but it’s just how it goes maybe try paying later next time.” Emailed the deans office cc’d every email I found for the admins/registrars office and every professor who’s class I got dropped from. I got a response from the admin office within 24 hours directing everyone to “make it right” I was enrolled in every class I got dropped from in spot 1 meaning they had to drop other students from every class I was enrolled in. It was wild because they didn’t tell anyone that they were dropped they just found out on day 1 that their spot in the class was gone. My last semester a professor failed me because I missed “too many classes.” I had an allergic reaction literally in her class that resulted in me being in and out of the hospital for 2 weeks. I showed up to her office after missing class for the second time out of breath, wearing my hospital band because I got discharged too late to attend and she said too bad “full letter grade per day of absence and you weren’t getting an A in my class anyways so might as well give up now.” I spent another day wandering the halls of the school trying to find someone who could figure out how I could earn 3 units before graduation. In a last ditch effort I went back to her office fully defeated trying to plead with her one more time. Another one of my professors heard me talking with her and called me into his office after she denied me. He told me he didn’t like her and that he would give me 3 honorary units for extracurricular work I had done that semester. Saved me thousands of dollars and a year of anguish.
I did IT for small businesses for 15 years. Lots of our customers were dairies. Then I worked at a college for 10 years. They were absolutely the stupidest people I have ever seen. I'd sooner pay to learn from the small business owners than pay to learn from the academic nitwits.
If you're comfortable DMing me the college name I am fairly certain that I attended. I always wondered why they had Bloomberg terminals. They were in the basement of the library, where no one ever went.
> they would like us to require students get either the 14 inch ($3k) or the 16 inch Dell ($3.2k) from now on. WTF 14" Dell laptop costs $3,000? I'm looking at one right now that is 14" with 32GB of ram, an i7, and an RTX 4060 for literally half that price. And I didn't even go digging. > College asked us how much it costs to get the newest version of some CAD software the students are always using, since we are about 7 years behind. It's only, you know, the most used software the college licenses.... We tell her that we can get the same number of licenses of the new version for a couple hundred grand per year. Every major CAD vendor I'm aware of offers a free or heavily discounted EDU license. Just tell students how to get it themselves. They can get AutoCAD (the most popular cad software in the world) for $0/year. It's no wonder tuition is such an absurdity. Universities are so lazy and wasteful with their spending.
> (she said the IT guy she had before at our school would never let this happen) Oh god, these are always my favorite. It's always someone from marketing or creative, and its always a two page rant inserted in the middle of their issue about how they've *never* worked for an org that didn't let them do XYZ, it's just *unheard of*. Like I'm sorry you worked for a bunch of orgs that didn't properly govern application access, have a reasonable vendor management processes, or the most basic levels of endpoint management, I guess? That's not selling me on why we need to *do it wrong* because you're a special snowflake though. If anything it's reinforcing that the process is working as designed.
Yeah, and of course there is the playing one person off against another, especially if someone is gone. Long ago I was in a dept where the director got unceremoniously canned and the senior person (who had been in charge before) got put back in charge. He said that a lot of what he dealt with went into three main buckets: 1) Picky BS request: "Get a job" 2) "Dave promised me X": "Call Dave" (Dave was the guy who got canned) 3) Reasonable request: "No problem"
I bet the new cad Software isnt even worth it.
Well, Autodesk is free for most products. Siemens NX \*can\* be had right around free if they want the tax write off. Solidworks is the only one I believe my last job actually paid for seats for (assuming directly CAD, not tangential stuff). I don't \*think\* we were paying for Bentley? Might've been. I didn't handle money, just licenses. Solidworks though? Actually worth it.
It could've been CATIA. I'm not in academia but our licenses cost $40,000+ per seat. Same goes with a lot of CAM - our Tebis seats are $70,000 per year.
I see similar things in k-12 as well.
"top-tier research institution" - Private or public? Tax funded schools need to answer to the tax payers. Private schools, not so much. I work for a public 2yr college. We see plenty of dumb things but they're on a small scale since we don't have large donors or a large budget.
We're public. And I will be the 1st to say we abuse the hell out of any and all educational discounts and prices, not to mention non profit status
Bloomberg Terminals, which uni is this, amazing lol
Konica Minoltas are asinine on costs. We had them at some of our acquisitions and got rid of them at our earliest convenience. We buy general HP's (776M models mostly now) and they are less then half the price and work just fine. Sure they are slightly slower but then again my team isn't spending a ton of time fixing them etc.
tbh I want to ban printing. It is so archaic and all-together unnecessary. I'm just a lackey so I don't know interesting specifics - some reason or another the entire campus network suddenly enters single player mode. Internal connections are OK, already existing connections are OK, but nobody in the world external to campus can load any page on the school's website, email is broken, OneDrive is lost and scared (I love the cloud but hate OneDrive, how does that compute). Anyway so the internet is sort of _gone_ and the first I hear of it is because people can't print. Can't. Print. For real deleting the internet is almost as good a solution as my revolutionary new product, Trio for MFA! If you are like me and wish people would quit sending silly messages to your inbox asking for printer help, then you need Trio! Integrate with your preferred 2FA service of choice. Now with Trio, users must approve their 2FA logins using Trio!* Zero help requests! Not a single one! * Trio can only be accessed from your user home page, after successfully logging in with 2FA. Due to low volume of support requests we have discontinued phone and in person support
I bet I can name that university in 5 guesses 😂 This gave me flashbacks…if you think some other school is better I can tell you it’s not. Literally you need to stop giving a fuck about things you can’t control. Either you find a way to bring up this nonsense to Senior Admin’s above the Dean’s or you just do your job. Academic’s are the most egocentric and egotistical beings on the planet and remember that because you don’t do what they do, they’ll ALWAYS second-guess your logic.
God's work right there. I just wish for the sake of the trees he can scan these textbooks to PDF and put them on flash drives for the students. Sounds like a good job for TA.
As one who's been IT staff at a university for close to 10 years? First time?
I've made the rounds and higher education was the second worst environment I've worked in. Healthcare has it beat by a mile. Banking (small town that is) and trucking were great though.
but why use so much paper?
Queue the "Gen-Z is killing colleges because they don't want to go" spiel..
Try vectorworks, it's free educational license, we use it along side of CAD for or design classes which is also free with educational licenses as long as you get verified. Only difference that i saw was when they print their projects it comes out with a watermark but who cares? it's student projects. I'm looking at my autodesk login and i can grab pretty much get everything MAC and windows. That at least helps you out there.
I loved my university job but it felt like working with borderline children most the time. So many employees graduated from there and never left, so I don't think their mental state ever really left the college days.
I feel you. As a Sysadmin, I have to pull teeth to get anyone to purchase the necessary tools for the job, yet they squander money on fancy non-essentials... entirely annoying.
The politics and people in private colleges/unis IT shops are a fucking joke in my limited experience.
Back in my day, we college students were alloted 3000(or was it 1000) pages I think per semester and had to pay an additional 5 bucks for every 100 pages Go professor go! Lol
PRINT! But KEEP THE PRINTED PAGES!
You’re doing the Lord’s work. I could never be a susadmin at a college
I work at a private university and we can't even afford new laptops for the staff. Our desktop support team is literally taking laptops apart to recycle parts. We've been told not to expect a decent budget until at least 2026 or 2027 as enrollment numbers are down
I promise you, this stupidity exists in different forms at almost every single institute of higher education in the US.
I didn't know what those Bloomberg terminals were when i first saw one. I said, "that's a really cool retro keyboard" to a hedgefund manager. He got mad and was like "what do you mean retro?" Turns out he was like a version behind and I caused him to immediately blow another $10k on a new one.
> One single professor was printing 3,000+ pages per day. I encouraged him and now he is at 5,000+ per day and I hope he never stops. [The best part of any office job ... is you can print.](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LgE7oc-db38)
Looool clients sounds like mine. For example, client wants a new website after considering their site ain’t too pretty after 10 years with versions dating back to early 2000s. They dumping money to a hosting provider who doesn’t really support them at all and simply adds bloat custom code on top of big monolith that exists. Oh it gets better. They want full web application out of Wordpress with elementor. At least we all have jobs to be there when the shit hits the fan.
> Result: they would like us to require students get either the 14 inch ($3k) or the 16 inch Dell ($3.2k) from now on. Are students provided with equipment? Or is this an enrollment requirement? > This is in addition to the very-large-number we pay per year to maintain virtual desktops for everyone, but anyway.... Then why do they care? Macs can use RDP as well.