Dose's Sometimes DIY and Pay Someone Home & Boat Improvement Thread

[Kinkstaah]

I find it stunning someone would leave IT and get into.... mortgage broking?

Is it massively lucrative and easy AF?

[soviet_merlin]

I have to admit I had the same thought as Greg. Is there a sales side to it? As in hussle to make deals and hit targets?

I can definitely feel the appeal of leaving IT though. I say hello to the post lady every day when I'm out with the dogs. She's always out delivering letters around the same time and seems very chill. I somewhat doubt Australia Post is paying six figures though. And it's not cheap running an old Nissan...

[MBS206]

14 hours ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

CSV? Come on lad, I'm all about PowerBI these days.

I would consider working as a PowerBI or ZOHO DataPrep consultant, but nah, I've had enough of IT. Two decades of being in somewhat in an industry I kind of just chose because I had zero guidance when I was younger.

PowerBI you say... I hate that Microsoft shit... Ha ha ha

Have you ever done much coding to build a connector plugin for PowerBI?

Most of the stuff I do at work through our API is all custom scripts, so easy peasy, but PowerBI prefers a custom connector, otherwise it's a pain the ass making a HTTPS endpoint due to all the variations we can have in our system.

We have both API you can call, and web hook alerting. You can receive a post request from on specific events.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

On 16/10/2024 at 9:29 AM, Kinkstaah said:

I find it stunning someone would leave IT and get into.... mortgage broking?

Is it massively lucrative and easy AF?

When you do the hours I do, and deal with the amount of morons you'll understand. Also working for a corporation, they're always monitoring you, they're always expecting you to work and be available for fixed hours of the day and never seem to notice the hours you do outside of the prescribed hours - but in some way they expect you to do it anyway.

I'm just burnt out.

And not really, it's not lucrative and easy AF as you may think, I spent about 2 to 3 solid days per loan (if you were to condense them down). Most of the time you spend going through talking to the client, going through lenders/products/options then the document analysis, etc. then the gruelling part, the data entry 🫠

Once I leave the corporate world, no more fixed salary, as a broker I'm working on $0 salary, 100% comms.

 

On 16/10/2024 at 10:13 AM, soviet_merlin said:

I have to admit I had the same thought as Greg. Is there a sales side to it? As in hussle to make deals and hit targets?

I can definitely feel the appeal of leaving IT though. I say hello to the post lady every day when I'm out with the dogs. She's always out delivering letters around the same time and seems very chill. I somewhat doubt Australia Post is paying six figures though. And it's not cheap running an old Nissan...

Depends, if you worked for a broking company then there would be deals/targets. As I'm a contractor to another broking firm, I just work to my own terms and serve my own clients and if I choose to, I can take leads from the company too. All my comms are clipped by the company I contract with, however they provide me with software, licencing, insurance, branding, etc.

You'll be surprised what Australia Post pays, you'll be crying, especially those who joined a while back, e.g. the boomers and early Gen Xers.

Not to disclose too much, but an average postal truck driver that would do normal hours and pick up 1x day on the weekend would earn as much as me in my corporate job.

 

23 hours ago, MBS206 said:

PowerBI you say... I hate that Microsoft shit... Ha ha ha

Have you ever done much coding to build a connector plugin for PowerBI?

Most of the stuff I do at work through our API is all custom scripts, so easy peasy, but PowerBI prefers a custom connector, otherwise it's a pain the ass making a HTTPS endpoint due to all the variations we can have in our system.

We have both API you can call, and web hook alerting. You can receive a post request from on specific events.

I came from a Tableau background, so at the start fk me PowerBI pissed me off, especially when you have datasets (like sales data) with missing continuous dates, the entire dashboard would shit the bed.

I literally had to create a dynamic date table (using min(invoice_date) and getdate()) to create the table, THEN link all the sales data back to it. Pain in the arse!

But after 5 years of fking about with it, it's ok.. I don't mind it lol.

I'm lucky all the PowerBI publishing I do is all internal, and authenticated using M365 account, no fancy shit required and I just embed dashboards into channels inside Teams.

[MBS206]

1 hour ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

When you do the hours I do, and deal with the amount of morons you'll understand. Also working for a corporation, they're always monitoring you, they're always expecting you to work and be available for fixed hours of the day and never seem to notice the hours you do outside of the prescribed hours - but in some way they expect you to do it anyway.

I'm just burnt out.

And not really, it's not lucrative and easy AF as you may think, I spent about 2 to 3 solid days per loan (if you were to condense them down). Most of the time you spend going through talking to the client, going through lenders/products/options then the document analysis, etc. then the gruelling part, the data entry 🫠

Once I leave the corporate world, no more fixed salary, as a broker I'm working on $0 salary, 100% comms.

 

Depends, if you worked for a broking company then there would be deals/targets. As I'm a contractor to another broking firm, I just work to my own terms and serve my own clients and if I choose to, I can take leads from the company too. All my comms are clipped by the company I contract with, however they provide me with software, licencing, insurance, branding, etc.

You'll be surprised what Australia Post pays, you'll be crying, especially those who joined a while back, e.g. the boomers and early Gen Xers.

Not to disclose too much, but an average postal truck driver that would do normal hours and pick up 1x day on the weekend would earn as much as me in my corporate job.

 

I came from a Tableau background, so at the start fk me PowerBI pissed me off, especially when you have datasets (like sales data) with missing continuous dates, the entire dashboard would shit the bed.

I literally had to create a dynamic date table (using min(invoice_date) and getdate()) to create the table, THEN link all the sales data back to it. Pain in the arse!

But after 5 years of fking about with it, it's ok.. I don't mind it lol.

I'm lucky all the PowerBI publishing I do is all internal, and authenticated using M365 account, no fancy shit required and I just embed dashboards into channels inside Teams.

Ha ha ha, so you're telling me I'll hate it forever? 😛

As we don't use it, and don't need it for ourselves, the only time I need to know it is supporting a client to get it running, as I do all of our client integration support.

 

However building dashboards into Teams is interesting, and something I'll have to look at. We're presently moving over to 365 for exchange, giving all the office software to all staff, and ditch Skype for teams. Again, that's a me job right now too  I've already set some automation from our CRM I to teams, just wanky shit someone wanted within the company to let everyone know when new sales occur. *Rolls eyes* just more stuff to distract other teams that already get distracted too easily 😐

 

 

[Kinkstaah]

Tbh, as someone who has been in IT for 20 years, I too relate to what Dose is saying.

It frustrates me to no end that an Executive EA who manages emails and calendar for some VIP is a whole pay rung higher than the people they trust to implement and figure out email for the entire organization, or lead the teams that implement and support it on a technical level.

It feels mind-alteringly dumb to quit, become an EA, and earn $20K a year more.

I suppose it is what it is. Seeing people in the finance industry earn double for 0 technical skill does drive me a bit nuts. I suppose that's what they get by working in a soul-less, money driven thing. It's like.. what do you people do and why should anyone give a f**k about it. It doesn't provide any value whatsoever.

/rant

IT Workers around the globe should strike at once, that would be f**kin amazing lol.

[No Crust Racing]

Almost 25yrs working IT here, from on tools to mid/upper manager levels within everything from ASX listed national MSPs, through to small scale internal IT, and now still doing IT, but for a community focused Social Enterprise (where we must give 50% of profits back to community and social programs and also can run our own, i.e. I go get grants from AusGov to do cool shit for people such as free Cel-Fi mobile boosters across 3 LGAs etc).

Guess which one is better? The one that is less sales focused and more community focused. Corporate IT is f**ked, I was very close to leaving the industry also.  Workers, systems, and technology are just tools to drive a bottom line, so everyone wants it for nothing and max return on that nothing. IT, to me, is primarily supposed to be a way to solve problems and drive improvement, be that business or community related. Not have a KPI to sell 100x Office 365 E3s this month or close 50 tickets, that just breeds the wrong behaviours IMO.

Everybody thinks it's easy, my cousin does it etc etc, it used to be seen as more white collar/specialist work. The tech has helped in some ways (to make things easier) but worse in others. I am personally not a fan of administering Office365/InTune etc at ALL, give me o prem exchange ANY day, but I was very good at it and I know some people really struggled with it when things went wrong. 

I contracted in Melb for a while and I knew very early on that metro IT in particular was not for me.

I support this move, especially if it improves your work life balance. 

 

[MBS206]

On the topic of 365 vs OnPrem.

I'd love to have everything as OnPrem. They've made shit so much harder, and more confusing using 365!

I have done IT as a tech, and in sales. I used to get told off a little for not doing what I had to (dropping the$$$) to get sales through quickly. Yep, my sales on a full overhaul of a customers site (servers, network gear, PCs, etc) may have taken an extra month to get completed, and about 2 hours more of my actual time, but the people giving me grief on not getting it done quickly also couldn't work out how my profit margins were always sooo good. I knew the value of what I sold, so sold it properly.

Work also got told to jamm it squarely when they started doing tracking of every little things you did at work. There was no way I was ever going to entertain that idea for them. 

Thankfully in my current role, IT stuff is more one of those side roles I just do for the company. And the owner values me highly for it, and the engineering work I do. Which means I get rewarded pretty darn well

[No Crust Racing]

Still so many nerds on SAU. 

[Kinkstaah]

18 minutes ago, MBS206 said:

On the topic of 365 vs OnPrem.

I'd love to have everything as OnPrem. They've made shit so much harder, and more confusing using 365!

I have done IT as a tech, and in sales. I used to get told off a little for not doing what I had to (dropping the$$$) to get sales through quickly. Yep, my sales on a full overhaul of a customers site (servers, network gear, PCs, etc) may have taken an extra month to get completed, and about 2 hours more of my actual time, but the people giving me grief on not getting it done quickly also couldn't work out how my profit margins were always sooo good. I knew the value of what I sold, so sold it properly.

Work also got told to jamm it squarely when they started doing tracking of every little things you did at work. There was no way I was ever going to entertain that idea for them. 

Thankfully in my current role, IT stuff is more one of those side roles I just do for the company. And the owner values me highly for it, and the engineering work I do. Which means I get rewarded pretty darn well

This is so interesting, because I manage a Hybrid Onprem/Exchange Online environment/M365 Tenancy. I find 365 MUCH more intuitive than our On-Prem systems running Exch2019 for example. If my email servers could f**kin tell me in plain text WHY they are unhealthy it would have made my week so much fkin better. I am reading SAU instead of re-reading the event logs right now.

Not to mention the less technical overhead of managing servers which more or less run an app. Then again, once you are entirely in a cloud, any cloud... it's very easy for Microsoft or whoever to just up the price x% and you just have to wear it. I suppose right now we have the worst of both worlds by having a hybrid setup.

If you look at Powershell versus something like Logic Apps, you can see it's by far a better setup, because purely on intuition it's much simpler for many people, who simply want to say "When X, Do Y, Tell Z" for 99% of their stuff. Yes, it's less powerful at it's core, but do you need it? If you can articulate what you want to have happen in human-readable language it's a big step forward than attempting to translate that into on-premise/powershell code.

I will echo Mr No Crust - Working in IT where the core business does something valuable to humanity is the way to do it. And honestly you can see it. I've worked in various firms over the years, in various countries. When you see the people work there for ~2-3 years, you can see why.

When they're all there 10-20 years, you can also see why. Especially if the people working there 10-20 years on lower than average pay. This stuff is valuable in any work environment tbh, and you should be mindful to take 'advantage' or at least appreciate the good/acknowledge the bad sides of either type of environment lest you go insane in both of them.

[GTSBoy]

I'm an engineer. I am not supposed to do IT. I have been doing my company's IT for 25 years, because initially there was no one else capable and since because I don't trust anyone.

Back in the day, we used to run a Linux server with just sendmail level mail handling. Everything was POP and SMTP. Then, someone demanded calendaring and the like, so I implemented Scalix (an OS Exchange clone) - from scratch. Migrated all the numpties over, administered that system for years. Then Scalix started to decline. So I spun up a full Zimbra system. Same same as Scalix, but different (ie, not even a fork). Ran that for a while in parallel with Scalix as I tried to migrate old users over. Both of these were on prem, with local backup in the case of Zimbra. (No backup at all on the Scalix server! Gasp!)

At some point, I spat the dummy, after years of this, and capitulated and bought O365 for the whole company and migrated everyone off the on prem stuff and shuffled them off to the cloud. It has been easier and shitter ever since, seeing as MS cannot leave anything alone for more than 3 minutes and have to keep changing everything and making it "better' (I read that as "harder"!). It's like their entire crew are ADHD squirrels on meth.

Meanwhile, all our data has been kept on prem on file servers with decent backup. Now the higher ups are demanding that we migrate all the data to the cloud. I am shuddering at the idea that it will all be held to ransom on some shit AWS or, even worse, Azure/Sharepoint system where you're at the mercies of the above posted price hikes, commercial disputes, company collapses/takeovers/DOS attacks/etc etc. I hate it. But... if it can get me free of the bloody IT shit so I can finally concentrate on real engineering work for the first time in 25 years, then.... good?

[Kinkstaah]

I mean something people seem to be WOEFUL at is doing a proper cost/benefit analysis. Going cloud is great, if it saves you time and money.

Does it? I have found a LOT of managers just want 'the new thing' with SUB-zero understanding of what it is and how it functions and why they need it. I spend a lot of time on that point nowadays too.

[GTSBoy]

12 minutes ago, Kinkstaah said:

I mean something people seem to be WOEFUL at is doing a proper cost/benefit analysis. Going cloud is great, if it saves you time and money.

It's worse than that. They cannot even picture the full scope of what it is that they are pitching or wanting. They see the core idea and cannot conceive of any of the side effects, compromises, losses of existing functionality that needs to be replaced somehow, etc etc, that come with doing these things. So how can they do a cost/benefit when they don't even know what the full set of changes actually looks like?

[Kinkstaah]

Yes, this is why I end up being 'vocal' with executives.

"I want it" can't be "Just because we should have it" you need reasons. It has way too big knock on effects to simply want something "Just because" at that level in orgs with 10,000+ employees.

Currently, message labelling. Sounds great. Except there is no governance on how to actually HANDLE message labels, so I may as well implement the labels as "Pink Flamingo" or "Conrod" or "Massive Dildo" and force people to choose one for every message, with no framework underpinning any of it. It has no value and can actually have detrimental value if all it does is serve to annoy people into clicking something random, or just using the default for everything, especially if there's no repercussions for getting it wrong, no monitoring for people doing it right, and no guidance on what needs to be what label.

"But we need message labels!"

f**k sake.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

On 17/10/2024 at 12:42 PM, MBS206 said:

However building dashboards into Teams is interesting, and something I'll have to look at. We're presently moving over to 365 for exchange, giving all the office software to all staff, and ditch Skype for teams.

Think of it as a fancy iFrame with the auth passed through to PowerBI as you're already authenticated logged into Teams

 

7 hours ago, MBS206 said:

I'd love to have everything as OnPrem.

I'm the complete opposite, I hate everything on Prem, it's slow as shit, you need VPNs to get anything happening, then when you want on-prem DBs to talk to say PowerBI you need to install/setup data gateways to essentially VPN back into your SQL instance.

I suppose from my perspective, on-prem sucks, but from an infrastructure perspective, your environment is somewhat air gapped to the web via your firewall(s), etc.

 

6 hours ago, GTSBoy said:

I'm an engineer. I am not supposed to do IT. I have been doing my company's IT for 25 years, because initially there was no one else capable and since because I don't trust anyone.

The curse of knowledge, the more you know the more you suffer.

Farken philosophical shit.

[MBS206]

1 hour ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

Think of it as a fancy iFrame with the auth passed through to PowerBI as you're already authenticated logged into Teams

 

I'm the complete opposite, I hate everything on Prem, it's slow as shit, you need VPNs to get anything happening, then when you want on-prem DBs to talk to say PowerBI you need to install/setup data gateways to essentially VPN back into your SQL instance.

I suppose from my perspective, on-prem sucks, but from an infrastructure perspective, your environment is somewhat air gapped to the web via your firewall(s), etc.

 

The curse of knowledge, the more you know the more you suffer.

Farken philosophical shit.

The best part of my setup is, we only have two sites. Our head office where I'd put every thing has plenty of internet capacity. We're on a 200/200 dedicated fibre. Even better, there's only like 6 people in the office at most, and the other office has 2 people in it (likely 3 soon).

The majority of our work is in a custom piece of software, as it is part of the backend of the system we provide to customers.

For our arrangement, on prem would be wayyyyy easier, and a VPN tunnel site to site is easy for me to manage.

Scaled at many many sites, or quite a few hundred employees it's starts getting a bit different for all people outside the head office.

However, everything in the cloud becomes worse for the people who operated previously at the site that held the servers, as now they're at the mercy of their internet, and not GBPS internal network (f**k the idiots who hook a desktop PC up on WiFi or permanently sit at a desk using a laptop and don't go remotely with it).

 

It really does come down to the business needs and structure as to what is best. For us, 365 is mainly being moved to for office apps, moving email from Google to Exchange, and setting up "Active directory".

Otherwise we have a ticketing system with support that runs on our own cloud system, or the sales process sits in a CRM we pay for.

My biggest push back for having most of the shit turned off and saying no when people want new shiney things is "that won't meet our security requirements, or efficiency gains, so all you're requesting is money spend to open us up to security issues, or to make our staff less efficient"

Which is funny when one of our core values is "To do more, with less"

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

42 minutes ago, MBS206 said:

really does come down to the business needs and structure as to what is best. For us, 365 is mainly being moved to for office apps, moving email from Google to Exchange, and setting up "Active directory".

100% this, no point delivering a steam oven when the client just wanted a toaster 

[niZmO_Man]

On 13/10/2024 at 9:54 PM, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

mortgage broking

blardy scammer, anyways once i get married i will come speak to you (again). You're legit my hookup guy now bahahaha

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

7 hours ago, niZmO_Man said:

blardy scammer, anyways once i get married i will come speak to you (again). You're legit my hookup guy now bahahaha

 

Hey it's SAU, we are all talented in many different ways, I'm sure I'll come to you for things one day too 😊

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Been needing a new clutch for a while, but holding off because of life tingz and adulting.

But... Being of Asian descent, I can't pass on a good sale, especially everyone else is selling it for $2k+ (JJR has it for $1799).

Really on the fence on this one, because the unsprung version of this is $1281 via Shitbox (Sparesbox) and the sprung version is quite a bit more (no idea why Shitbox doesn't offer them).

Ending up just sending it and getting the twin sprung organic. Mainly because I wanted the car to be nice to drive and didn't want to make it more of a shitbox than it already is.