Edit: I realize "got told off" didn't really capture what happened. I came in early one day and noticed we were having a dns issue. I manually refreshed my DNS cache and it started to work. I sent him an email to let him know that the DNS cache was expired. He told me I was out of line and complained to HR.
I had to go meet with HR, which was pointless since they think he is on a power trip as well. Anyways he added a line to the IT policy that specifically prohibits "performing a diagnosis on the network or any of IT managed systems."
I got into trouble at university when I was running a CAD session on X (Cadence VLSI design FTW, not). Some asshat had telnetted in and was trying to brute force root because it was a faster machine than the crappy sun4's dotted around. It was spewing all over the framebuffer. So I logged into another box and sent him an email saying pack it in and that I was trying to work and that I'd report him for AUP violation to the Sysops.
He complained (?!!!) and the next thing I was in front of a tutor getting a bollocking for it. No explanation was allowed to be returned or appealed, permanent black mark on my record.
And that's when I learned about university politics, gave them the fat middle finger and got a job and left a massive 11 page long diatribe about the charlatans at the place.
I basically went through all my tickets and emails, took IT directors claims, read the MSDN articles on the topic, and pointed out all of the places where what he said was not only wrong, but grossly wrong. Things like "sometimes databases lose data." That's funny, cause I'm sure the team that built SQL Server 2012 would have something to say about that. Why don't we look at the documentation on ACID principles.
I've come to expect the IT director to be a moron at this point, and I had been trying to roll with the punches. However, my work has been going missing, and I got in trouble for it. He denied losing it, then he blamed the database for his incompetence. I was so angry I was awake for 3 days straight cross referencing everything.
The lost data wouldn't have even been a problem if he had just told me within a day or two. I only find out it's missing when we try finding it weeks or months later. Then I have to waste my time doing a forensic investigation in to the scope of the problem.
The most annoying this is that the last person in this role never had any of these issues because nobody ever audited our data. I have managed to instill the idea that data can be 100% correct, and we should always be checking our data to make sure it's right. So now I get blamed anytime information is missing or incongruous.
The important people often see those things, assume it's an incoherent screed from a disgruntled piece of crap, and delete it without reading (I know from personal experience; such completely accurate and valid diatribes have gotten me fired on the 3rd day of my 2-week notice and, on a separate occasion, a running joke among the big shots for months after my departure, where one would specifically talk about how the email came in while he was on the toilet, at which point he cackled and promptly deleted it without reading).
To anyone non-technical, that letter is all mumbo jumbo. It seriously might as well be in a foreign language. They are not going to check a few of the cross-references and see that you're obviously right. Even though you might hope they'll do this just one or two times, they won't.
They are not going to ask the people called out in your letter to account for your accusations.
They are going to write you off as an unhinged, angry, and worthless nothing-tier employee/student/whatever, make fun of you for a long time, and then forget all about it.
Humans base their decisions on personal trust/credibility. The way to win against an evil IT director is to obtain far more trust/credibility in the eyes of his bosses than he has, and then to use that credibility to your advantage.
That's a lengthy and difficult process, especially when you start out as a subordinate and the boss has a lot more access and ability to frame your efforts to his advantage.
I personally have never had the patience to undertake such political subterfuge seriously and I find such undertakings both incredibly frustrating and soul-crushingly phony and hypocritical, but I am now convinced it is the only reliable way to get real career success and mobility. Thus I accept that any career success I enjoy will be lucky/accidental.
Employment and career IS a popularity contest. Good software is somewhere between the 10th and 20th most important career concern for a developer. The number one concern for anyone trying to make it in white-collar America is to be as well-liked and popular as possible. Most of the time, love of colleagues and love of bosses are symbiotic and they feed off of each other (as long as you're sycophantic efforts aren't TOO obvious), but to the extent that a situation arises wherein someone's love has to be preferred, prefer to get the love of the bosses.
This is the sure path to career success. Disregard truth, objectivity, and practicality. No one cares about you or what you think, they don't care about what you judge to be practical or wise. They didn't really hire you for your experience or insight even though they want to pretend they did. They hired you because they thought you would make them feel and look good.
Not only bosses, but people in general, care only that your presence and actions are generating pleasant feelings for them. Do this reliably, disregard everything that is not this, put only as much energy into the tasks required by your actual job description as you must to be passable in the unlikely event of a performance audit, and pour the rest of your energy into social development. If you're going to make it as a company man, that's the only reliable path.
He told me I was wrong. So, I wrote a .bat with a netsend command and emailed it to all staff. Multiple staff clicked on the attachment.
Once they figured out it was me, they made me start a computer club with the IT manager as the supervisor of the club. First order of business was locking down .bat execution.
That seems like a great way to handle this situation. Some ignorant other schools might have kicked you to the curb because you were spreading "malware".
They also were way cooler than they had to be about the several times we took down the network or broke the porn filters, or the time we port-scanned a district tech's machine, or had a whole collection of malware on the network drive, or....
I just worry about how students like me would fare in schools these days.
Two hours later, I faced an angry teacher (who was also a math teacher and the lead teacher for our class). She said something about the next person after me freaking out that "the computer has viruses". Got a bad note for behaviour, spot-check of math homework leading to three F grades, and she also tried to take away my notebook with notes about Windows Registry -.-
A coworker sent me an email because some data I was in charge of adding to the system was missing. I looked, and somehow data in our database had gone missing. I use the data to add information to another database, and that database had the information in it. So somehow he managed to lose information in SQL Server.
A few weeks later, my boss brought me in to his office because about 25k rows had incorrect information. I went to check my notes, and all of my notes from a period of 10 days were missing. I had been creating a changed file log (because files have been lost in the past), and I could see I had created notes during those dates, but they didn't exist anywhere.
The only evidence I had done my job at all during that time were the emails I sent to other people. (Thankfully Microsoft hosts these, so the IT director can't mess it up.) I had sent somebody an email that basically said "I found error [x], but I fixed it."
For a little while I was questioning whether I was insane. I mean, I would never have believed it was possible for data that you've added to an ACID database to just disappear. If you can't trust ACID principles, what can you trust?
I'm currently looking for a role, but I've worked here for 3 years because I have been able to basically do whatever I want. I'm a combination of analyst, data scientist, and marketer. I'm in charge of our appeals, from strategy all the way to the money coming back in house.
We have over half a million constituents. It's really great if you are interested in testing. I've sent out mailings where I'm testing 10 or 11 different factors. I've tested basically everything: the size of the font, the weight of the letterhead, the format of the coupon, how the letter is mailed, the dimensions of the envelope, the structure of the ask, etc.
Even with the added expense of testing, I've decreased our cost to raise a dollar by over 20 cents.
On top of that, I've automated all sorts of processes. At this point, I think my processes save about a man-month per month.
So, I have a lot to feel good about, but I'm really being limited on the technology side of things at this point. Biggest barrier is that I haven't quite decided what I want my next step to be at this point. I'm afraid I'll end up with a job with a much narrower focus and get bored.
Sincerity helps, both as a shield and as a way to diffuse the inevitable frustration that comes from troubleshooting tech.
Of course, I've got a strong force of will, too, so I tend to mix poorly with charlatains like the grandfather's post. I really feel for the souls who have to work under that jerk.
I'm definitely a friendly PITA. Most of my coworkers get it, though some definitely think that I'm just creating more work for myself. It's really only the IT director who is so defensive, and unfortunately he has the power to back it up. HR goes out of their way to find answers to questions, and my immediate coworkers are really driven.
I knew what the problem was because I had run in to that issue a few years back with my own computers. After I updated my DNS, all the Windows computers were having issues, but none of the Linux ones were. That's when I learned that Linux doesn't typically cache DNS records on local machines.
