[dvtrn]

Will we ever learn?

Asking myself this question everyday in an org that uses Skype for Business, Teams, Slack and...yes, there’s an island of engineers and ops people using IRC sneering at all of us from the horizon. Hell we still have people struggling to set up conference bridges and video calls and have resorted to buying their own solutions and expensing them back to payroll. I’ve been given expense reports for paid accounts for Zoom, LogMeIn and someone even tried expensing $3 after buying their own phone number and writing a single serving conferencing app on top of Twilio.

I found that last one especially creative and especially worrisome if these are the lengths people are going through.

I’ve sat through four all hands calls now where “unified communication” was brought up and “infra-departmental communication” was mentioned as the leading gripe on preceding employee satisfaction surveys.

Yet here we are.

Hilarious, when you consider we sell wholesale communications platforms and services.

(When is the next “who’s hiring”? Mid-level Product Manager shackled by golden handcuffs seeks short walks to happy hour and a 4 day work week, heh)

[myself248]

You're not kidding! I once worked with teams of field techs for a large american cellular operator who shall not be named. I'd have 3 or 4 teams in the field, and I was at a desk pulling marionette strings in the network for them.

To communicate with them, I was issued a cellphone (natch), and when I asked if there was a preferred way to juggle the multiple teams, my predecessor said "Just keep the calls short so you minimize the chances of having to put one on hold when another calls you."

"Can I set up a conference bridge and then have them all call into it?"

"Those are expensive. No."

So apparently everyone at this enormous phone company was still living in the 80s when teleconferencing was something you paid for. I called up a buddy who set up a private bridge on his asterisk box, and I gave that number to all my field techs. It was great, I could step away for a moment and come back to find one tech giving advice to another, and in the end my buddy made a few bucks on recip comp over the thousands of minutes we logged.

Did anyone else in the whole company know this was possible?

[dvtrn]

who shall not be named

Okay. I’ll do it: it was Sprint wasn’t it? ;)