I currently have about five projects on the go in the game. Building automation for pretty much every item that you would need to build any building, building out a nuclear waste recycling plant (precursor to building a nuclear power facility… I don’t want to irradiate my save), rebuilding a few manufacturing plants for basic components that may already be automated poorly, finishing my resource area/hub base, doing some beautification of finished plants, maxing out my biomass bins, getting more hard drives… It never stops!
Next on my list is my steel factory which has been very poorly done for a long time; then rebuilding my reinforced plate/modular frame/rotor plant. The new steel plant will hopefully also make nobelisks, and stators, then I can just grab an assembler for the final production steps of motors at the hub base where both the rotors and stators will be going into their respective bins.
I’ve been focused mostly on power, I have 12000MW of coal/fuel power right now and I’m using maybe 60% at full production; but trying to build out a nuclear recycling plant without key components being automated already is making everything a headache, so I changed my focus to the hub base which is currently being built up with all my parts storage. Once I have the vast majority of the parts automated into the new base, I’m going to go back to the nuclear build before building the final plants for the last space elevator tier.
The milestones were done pretty fast this save and I kinda miss them. Everything is unlocked in the awesome shop, so now I’m working on making all the things and scaling up.
They’re all seemingly very strict about using their gear. They all are, they always are. They’re lying when they say that things aren’t compatible or something.
The biggest lie is that you can’t. You can, and most of the time, unless it’s creating a problem, they couldn’t give a shit less if their equipment is working correctly; as long as you pay your bill, and don’t complain, they don’t give a shit. They have your money, whether things work correctly isn’t their primary concern.
If you require v6 to be static, the ipv6 equivalent to a static IP is a static /64 subnet, aka, an entire LAN. Since it’s globally routable, it needs to be issued by an RIR, the same way an IPv4 address would be.
So yes, they would issue it.
If they don’t have facilities for ipv6, there are options, such as getting an ipv6 over IPv4 tunnel going with someone like he.net. such tunnels add complexity and more work to the set up and rely on you having a very flexible router, but can be a good alternative.
It’s very situationally dependent. In many cases though, the only thing restricting you is the ISP not giving you the information to do it yourself, and sometimes, just sometimes, some kind of code or MAC address that limits what devices can operate on their network; though that’s usually set up for billing.
If you use any kind of PPPoE, the MAC address problem usually isn’t a thing; this is normally DSL/Fiber… not all fiber, just some. PPPoE needs authentication which usually means username and password login to do AAA for the client, because of this, there’s little to no security on the last mile. All these technologies are based on standards. Fiber is usually GPON, DSL has several standards, but modern DSL is usually vDSL or vDSL2, or some variant thereof, and Cable is generally DOCSIS 3 or 3.1. There are exceptions, but they’re not common.
The key is to find which specific technology the ISP is using, and find alternatives. In the case of DSL, it’s generally finding a DSL modem that uses the same profiles and annex as the provided modem; beyond that, plug it in and authenticate with PPPoE. Many PPPoE type providers use a circuit number and/or VLAN, so that generally needs to be set along-side the PPPoE credentials.
For DOCSIS, it’s a bit sticky, since I know of many cable providers who authenticate endpoints based on the MAC address of the modem; in which case, you not only need to find a modem that can support the protocols in use, and the channel widths (eg. DOCSIS 3.1 16x8), but also one that you can modify the ISP-facing MAC address on the DOCSIS interface to match the one they gave you.
For Fiber, things can be sticky, but often aren’t. The ISP can, but often doesn’t filter on all of the following: MAC, SN, SLID. All of these values are sent to the OLT (ISP side of the fiber), and it could fail on any one of them. For me, I’ve had success with the G-010S-A SFP module, and if you look around the internet, you can find a git repo that actually has all the commands to modify any/all of these values to match them to whatever the ISP provided to you. The most difficult is getting the SLID, since it’s not published on the outside of the modem. I managed to get my local GPON’s SLID from a G-010S-A module that I hijacked from a working modem; in that case it was a string of all zeros.
The information is out there if you look hard enough, and with a little bit of cleverness and ingenuity, you can usually find anything that’s missing.
I work in Networking (aka network engineering, aka a bunch of other titles), so this all comes very naturally to me; to give you some examples, one DSL modem delete I did for myself was to pick up an EHWIC-VA-DSL-M for a Cisco ISR router, after some configuration magic, which I won’t get into here, I was able to get it to connect to my ISPs DSL line, after a bit more configuration magic, the Cisco was handling all of the traffic from my network to the DSL. It was a very clean setup, only requiring a single phone line from the wall plugged into a module on the router, then on the other side of it (over ethernet) was my network. That’s a fairly advanced one, but I’m pretty proud of it. Another case was a friend on the same last-mile provider in my country, on a fiber line, where I removed the garbage modem they gave him and replaced it with a G-010S-A GPON to SFP module, and plugged that more or less directly into the router he owned. In each case, I shaved off a few ms of latency, and bandwidth was largely unaffected. It makes the internet run just that much faster than before, and puts the control in your hands.
Needless to say, the ISPs don’t want you doing this, and they don’t approve, but in general, you can do so without their involvement and for the most part, they are entirely unaware that it’s happened.
Let me know what situation you’re in and we can probably devise a solution to the garbage ISP modem issue. Frankly, the fiber modem delete is my favorite.
depends on what you mean by “do anything”. I’ve managed to shed several ms of latency by doing a modem delete.
My two favorite stories of this were for the local DSL/fiber provider here in Canada, Bell. They use vDSL2, and GPON/XGS-PON respectively. In the former case, I set up a node at my house, which was a Cisco ISR router, with a vDSL2 EHWIC card installed; after some work, I managed to get the unit dialing into the internet via PPPoE, and I managed to drop about 5-10ms of latency simply by removing the ISP provided garbage. It was also clean… a single phone cable plugged directly into the router, and out the other side was a switch, which provided all the network connections I required… my setup was a tiny bit more complicated than I’m explaining, but the other details don’t really matter (long story short, I was operating on a Bell line through a wholesale client (third party ISP using Bell’s “last mile”), and they provided me with a /29 subnet for internet routing - the Cisco handled the WAN to WAN communication, and on my /29, I had a few devices including my primary firewall, which was between me and the internet, that then broke out onto a switch for everything to connect to… a bit more than the average joe can handle, but I work in networking). The other story is about their GPON; I managed to figure out that their GPON interface is almost entirely unprotected, and worked with a G-010S-A (a fairly common design from Nokia, but has variants from other major vendors that are largely the same), so by buying or otherwise obtaining one, and programming it very specifically, you can actually plug the SFP GPON module directly into a router, and with some clever configuring, get your PPPoE to work across it without too much trouble. There’s plenty of info about it online if you want to see more.
The only sad story I have about this is that Bell started to release a new modem that has a built in fiber module (no longer using the G-010S-A), which is compatible with both the GPON and XGS-PON systems; I have yet to find an XGS-PON version of the G-010S-A that I can use for the purpose. A friend of mine, whom I did a modem delete for with the G-010S-A, was in an area that was originally served by GPON, so the solution worked. After some time though, Bell implemented XGS-PON in his area, and actually removed compatibility for the GPON, so the solution stopped working. Until I find an XGS-PON equivalent to the G-010S-A, I’m at an impasse. In the interim, my friend has put his modem back in-line, and IIRC put it into bridged mode, which is second best to a modem delete.
I’m a network technician/engineer as my dayjob, so working with this stuff is entirely in my wheel house, I can usually give useful advice for anyone wanting to walk in my shoes to delete their modem, and make it simple enough that it doesn’t require my level of skill to maintain (like in the case of my friend), and advice/strategies about how to handle the ISP.
CG-NAT is entirely in the ISP hands, I cannot touch their fancy CG-NAT engine or route around it. My best advice for anyone facing down CG-NAT, is to use IPv6, if your ISP supports it. Simply put, the best argument I’ve seen for IPv6 adoption is CG-NAT. NAT itself was bad enough, but CG-NAT is a whole new level of evil; it breaks so many things. IPv6 takes you back to the old days of globally routable addresses, end-to-end, completely eliminating the need for any kind of NAT. A large portion of the internet uses/supports IPv6 already, pretty much all the major data carriers support it and actively use it for their own gear (people like google, facebook, apple, microsoft, cloudflare, etc). IPv6 shouldn’t be feared, as an end user, the whole thing is going to behave exactly as you expect it to. The trick is: getting it up and working on your LAN, once you can work that out, you’re laughing.
I usually do a very not ISP sanctioned modem swap/delete.
Depending on the type of modem, you may be able to simply replace it with something else and the ISP may not have any way to really differentiate between the modems.
Profit is not wages paid to workers other than yourself, even workers performing other job functions.
I understand, and I won’t discount this. However, there are costs to my labor that are separate from me. For example: If the business is charging $100/hr for my services, I don’t expect to be paid $100/hr for work. There’s other costs associated with my time, including frictional time between tasks, which may include time between tasks while in transit or simply task switching, or breaks, which the customer is not directly paying for but must be paid to me for my time. Legally here, over the course of an 8+ hour day, I am entitled to 60 minutes worth of breaks, 2x paid 15 minute, plus one lunch break (which may or may not be paid); I also have job tasks that are not related directly to producing profit, so on a good day, when I am exclusively working on a single unified task all day, I can “bill for” at most ~ 7 hours of work (some exceptions exist, but I won’t go too far into detail on this), but on an average day, I’m usually generating 5-6 hrs of “billable” work per day.
I cannot reasonably expect $500 to $600 in earnings per day due to overhead and costs. The associated costs of my work, from floorspace to do my job, electricity for the equipment I need to use, the equipment costs themselves (desks, chairs, computer, etc), as well as the costs for other workers time to support my work, in sales, marketing, accounting, etc. all needs to be covered from that ~ $500/day I’m producing for the company. So me earning ~ $250/day ( $31.25/hr, aka, 65k/yr ), or about 50% of the revenue I generate at $100/hr at 5 hours “billed” per day, needs to include consideration for the efforts of management, accounting/finance, sales/marketing, collection and all the non-producing contributors to my workspace, including but not limited to maintenance/janitorial. What’s left is profit, which likely isn’t very much per hour, but spread across all workers is a non-trivial amount.
At least, that’s how it should work. profit, as a function of revenue, should not exceed more than ~20% is the above mentioned scenario. Of course, the realities of the situation are far more nuanced and complex than that, since most MSPs charge monthly for service, not by the hour, so worker pay for the related team needs to balance against all representative clients of the team, with enough overhead to pay for and properly compensate the efforts of sales, marketing, finance, accounting, management, etc. before profit can be extracted from the remainder. Since every MSP client has a different contract and a different amount paid per month, usually based on that organizations headcount. Profit numbers are not strictly tied to the amount I’m not paid relative to the revenue I generate per hour/day/month for the company.
The core of my issue with all this is that companies do not understand all the contributing costs associated to labor, and how the revenue that individuals generate is distributed for the business, and what each employee costs/earns over the course of a day/week/month; and definitely don’t understand how much profit they earn per employee hour. I know this because this is a factor in burn rate, and I have asked business managers about burn rate and I’m usually met with looks of confusion or mystery in the matter. Burn rate is simply all those associated costs (salary/compensation, and all associated rent/electrical, and equipment costs) for an employee separate from the revenue they generate. Burn rate is used as an indicator of costs that should be accepted for downtime, and informs how much downtime should be tolerated by the business; that financial number, when known, can quickly inform how much to spend on redundancy, which is something that information technology advisors strive for. When a system is fully redundant, or multiple levels of redundant with no single-point-of-failure (SPOF), then the operation of the production equipment can be reasonably guaranteed 24/7, resulting in no downtime, less redundant systems will require downtime to perform maintenance, upgrades and unexpected faults. So if the burn rate, multiplied by the estimated average downtime of the system, is less than the cost of making the system fully redundant, the system shouldn’t be redundant; simply, it is cheaper. However, if the burn rate is significantly more than the cost of making the system redundant, given the estimated average duration of downtime, then the system should be made to be more redundant. This is something I very strongly understand. Sometimes it is simply not financially beneficial to add redundancy to a system (whether server/network/workstation or otherwise). Things that only affect one, or a small group of employees, generally do not justify being redundant; which is why your PC at work generally only has one ethernet connection to a single switch which is probably shared with a subset of workers in the workplace (as an example). You, and the people on that same switch (SPOF for that group of workers), don’t represent enough of a burn rate to justify making those systems redundant. This is a fact that is universally true for most workers. The costs associated with employing you while you are incapable of producing profit due to a major network fault that keeps you from working, are not enough to justify the added cost of redundant network connections from your workstation to redundant network connectivity on the network side. If the switch you’re connected to fails, a replacement can usually be prepped and replaced from a cold spare in a matter of hours, so for those hours while you cannot work, you’re burning money while a technician corrects the problem.
This cost is directly extracted from what would otherwise be profit. This is where profit is converted to overhead in real-time.
Profit, or additional overhead that will often not be utilized, needs to exist, for these edge cases where things have an unrecoverable fault and employees are incapable of doing their job. Profit itself isn’t horrible to have, excessive profit is definitely a problem though. There should always be more overhead/profit for the business to function correctly, and not collapse at the first significant failure. If the profit is excessive, then that’s literally taking money out of the pockets of workers to pay the upper-class.
My point is there is a legitimate purpose to having additional overhead above and beyond the direct and indirect costs of labor. That additional overhead may, or may not be profit at the end of the day, depending on what’s happened.
I understand all this and I accept it as a worker, what I would not and will never accept is when companies are making so much profit on my labor, that goes above and beyond any burn rate or coverage of excessive costs of incidentals, that they can still extract profit from a particularly poor month for downtime. If everything is operating well, then yes, that excess revenue can definitely become profit. Looking at the big picture, this is a trade-off. Profit should be sacrificed for the continued survival of the business during times where performance is poor, or downtime affects the ability to generate revenue.
I think my business diploma is showing. I will only add this: I received just enough education in business to know I don’t want to be a part of the business/management systems. Trying to figure all this out and make intelligent decisions on these types of things, seems like a horrible thing to have to do. I suspect this is why I get such dumbfounded looks when I ask about burn rate, because people want to spend so little time thinking about this stuff that they simply don’t. While I can’t really blame them for that, simply put, it’s their job. They decided to be in that role, and that’s a part of it.
This is all separate from the fact that companies/corporations are built with the express purpose of generating profit; which is an entirely different discussion usually fraught with some very unpleasant and often unethical topics. This fact has been more or less codified. There have been court cases of shareholders vs companies where the shareholders have sued because business leaders wanted the majority of profits to be repaid to employees in the form of bonuses and raises. IMO, this has fostered a culture of bad faith practices where profit is prioritized above workers on a consistent basis.
I’m not going to apologize or explain away the greed and profiteering of companies; I understand that’s what they exist for. Whether I agree with that or not, it’s the reality of the situation. Profit is the inevitable outcome of unused overhead which should always exist. Excessive profit, above and beyond safeguarding the business from failure during “slow” times or where revenue is difficult or impossible to generate, is simply greed. Unfortunately, in a capitalist world, greed seems to be the name of the game. It seems to be the foundation of all modern business, and also the thing that both makes it terrible trying to work within the system, or for it. Unless you’re at the top (C-level, shareholder, board of directors, etc), you’re on the losing end of business greed.
I want to update you specifically. I have a friend who is a paralegal, whom I have been speaking to throughout this matter, and through the course of our discussions I noted that in my department there has been three people, myself and two others prior to disability, for a bit during my disability there would have been two people in the department. However, I recently had just cause to return to the office to retrieve something that cannot be out of my possession, and excluding me, there were and currently are, three people in my department, there was a new person hired during my absence.
They rightly pointed out that it appears as though I was replaced.
I will be discussing this further with an attorney. I don’t want to say any more than this until after all matters have been legally resolved. What I will say, is that to my understanding of the laws here, and the understanding that my friend has, it is not legal to dismiss an employee without appropriate compensation, while they are away on leave, whether medical, disability or otherwise.
I have taken steps to retain council on this already. Thank you for your advice. I appreciate you very much.
I wouldn’t say it’s false, so much as incomplete. It’s not a complete statement. Nobody wants to work for what is being offered. That statement is true. I certainly won’t accept minimum wage for my skillset, and bluntly, minimum wage, even where I am (where it seems to be higher than most areas), is still not a living wage. The only jobs that should be under the minimum requirement of a living wage, IMO, should be part-time; in that scenario, it’s less a matter of making enough per-hour to live, and more an issue of not working enough hours to cross the line of a salary you can live off of. Even part-time workers should be paid enough that if they were working 35+ hrs a week, they could survive independent of all other factors. Any full time position, even at minimum wage, should be able to support a single individuals survival in the modern world, in the country/state/region they live in. Full stop.
When people stop at “nobody wants to work”, that incomplete sentence seems to imply that the general public doesn’t want employment, they do, they just want employment that won’t lead to poverty and destitution. That incomplete statement is gaslighting defamation and manipulation. I agree with that. The general public, IMO, doesn’t want handouts, they just want to be able to live reasonably for the labor that they provide.
I’m sure this will be news to nobody here but I’m going to rant on a bit of a tangent here for a sec… but historically, a single family (say in the mid 1900’s (20th century), eg, 1950/1960), on a single income, could afford a house, a car, several children, and some other luxuries. Now, on a single income, a family can’t even afford rent while putting food on the table. There’s more than enough evidence showing how this all happened; looking at a larger picture than most people would, it’s clear that for profits, C-level pay, and the upper-class (aka 1%) the line went up, dramatically, but for workers wages, benefits and income it either stayed flat (which is a decline when you factor in inflation), or they literally went down. Very very few have seen an appropriate increase in wage over time, keeping up with inflation. Anecdotally, my wages even in my short career, even with job hopping enough to get somewhat near reasonable raises, I haven’t been able to keep up with inflation. I started my career in 2011, my first job hop put me at a fairly reasonable $55k/yr in the early 2010’s. According to the official bank of canada inflation calculator, that wage has the current buying power of a bit over $72k/yr. at my most recent employer, I wasn’t making over $72k/yr. I cannot keep up. It’s more than a 30% increase in inflation from 2011 to 2023, just based on that alone.
I don’t want more money. If I had a job that paid me reasonably today (around $75k/yr), and only ever kept up with inflation, then I would never feel the need to change jobs for financial reasons ever again. I’m sure there are other reasons why I would change jobs, but money wouldn’t be the deciding factor. I just want to earn enough to live. This is compounded by the fact that my industry (IT support) in my country, Canada, is notoriously weak in terms of wages. Looking at the website glassdoor.ca for my job description, I see starting salaries of $57k/yr or even $41k/yr. Yet, a comparable job across the border into the USA, is similar per-year, but the US dollar is worth more, so a $41k/yr USD job is worth more like $56k/yr CAD, and $57k/yr USD is worth nearly $80k/yr CAD. The issue there is that I cannot relocate. I have constraints on where I can live and what I can do about it due to my personal situation (separate from work). I like it in Canada, it’s a wonderful country for the most part; but the wages for my specific vocation are very very lacking. If someone offered me $80k/yr on the low end, I’d be very happy with my wage - provided I could keep up with inflation.
What’s stupid to me, is that everyone relies on the work I do in my chosen profession. Everyone from C-levels to worker bees doing the paper pushing for the business and everything inbetween, almost all of whom are making more than me, in most businesses. I am the glue that keeps everything operating. My friend, who works in tech as a developer/programming analyst, was given a raise last year to over $100k/yr CAD ( ~ $72k/yr USD ); yet, if we worked together, he would rely on me to keep all of his dev servers running. If I don’t do my job, he can’t do his. It’s a leaning problem, and everything leans on IT support. Whether I’m a sysadmin, or network admin, or network engineer, or helpdesk, his work relies on me and my team to do their job for him to be able to do his. IMO, that’s really stupid to have many, very highly paid resources, relying on some of the lowest paid employees in the organization in order to do their job. What makes this even more stupid, IMO, is that the IT team is usually much smaller than other teams and under-represented by unions or other means. The organization will literally cease to function if IT doesn’t do their job and something breaks while they’re unavailable.
Businesses don’t understand the problem. It’s a matter of burn rate and the leaning problem of everyone relying on a single, unified system. I’m at the bottom of the stack, the network. That’s my focus. IMO, the network should never be in question. It should always work, and do the work it does quickly and effectively. A breakdown of the network precipitates a complete failure of the organization to do business. There’s no reason why the IT and support staff should be some of the lowest paid workers.
Okay, I’ll stop my rant for now, I just get so riled up by this. Management doesn’t understand and they probably never will.
this looks good on paper but no canadian branch exists currently. A good option for those living in an area covered by them (not me, but others may benefit).
countries with chapters include the USA, Brasil, India, Germany, Ireland, England, Italy, and The Netherlands.
joinifpte.org
International Federation of Professional & Technical Engineers.
They exist in Canada, but seem to be more oriented towards professional engineering (structural, electrical, that sort of thing), less-so things like network engineering.
I.T. staff missing from their “Occupations” under “whom we represent” on their about page. No related technical jobs are listed beyond Programmers, which could be computer programmers but also could be something else. They also list “Technicians” but that can really be anything also, so I have no idea.
Potentially worth contacting them to inquire further about whether they cover IT/support workers, and if so, what companies they represent, so I can focus job searching on the companies that are local to me.
upte.org
Part of the CWA
seems to represent mainly healthcare researchers and professionals, along with technicians (I assume in the medical field, like lab techs and assistants).
California based, seems to be US-centric, no international coverage, good for US workers in healthcare.
cwa-union.org
Has presence in Canada
"Communication Workers Association"; specifically referring to media workers, like TV and multimedia companies. Most notably for canada, they represent the workers of the CBC, or Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; which is great, but not really in the computers/technical field I’m in, and likely exclude I.T./support staff from contracts.
aflcio.org
Seems to be an umbrella for several other unions, most notably SAG-AFTRA, NFLPA, trades (electrical workers, machinists and aerospace workers, fabrication, etc). Very little if any unions listed seem to be computerized-tech related or specialized.
Their tagline is “America’s Unions” which should tell you all you need to know about their focused locale, probably not a great option for locales outside of the USA.
My main issue is with the fact that none of these explicitly list, and very likely do not represent workers in the computerized technologies, with the possible exception of programmers, which I am not a programmer. This is great information for anyone living in the USA or working in a highly technical/skilled environment, but does not pose an answer to my initial inquiry, which was a union that includes the IT support workers. For someone working a non-IT position, or someone working in the USA, there’s likely a union that only needs to be found.
I’m not angry or upset at the response at all, you tried and I appreciate that. Hopefully this is good information for other people, and I hope it helps them. It does not however seem to help me much or at all. Regardless, I appreciate the effort. Unfortunately as IT support, I’m generally cornered into non-union positions, which makes me vulnerable to more exploitation than other fields; which isn’t to imply other workers and groups are not exploited, they just usually have some options where they can have better representation that I could have to advocate for their wages and benefits compared to what I can do individually.
Regardless of all of the above, I wish everyone who reads this all the best in their career. I hope you all get the best representation possible, and that you’re successful in negotiating for your livelihoods regardless of your locale, chosen vocation, experience, race, religion or any other factor beyond your specific skill set. I bear no ill will towards anyone who has a union simply because I do not have the same opportunities.
I can definitely agree that the system has been an immense failure for the mass of the population. If the majority ever figure that out, then the thieves at the top are in major trouble.
I understand this entirely; the only statement I can make about “wearing multiple hats” at work, is the companies I’ve worked for (both the former employer, and this one) are both very small, so sometimes there’s not enough of your work to keep you busy, and making yourself useful for other departments is key to maintaining your employment. Sitting around waiting for work to fall from the sky, is not a good look.
In any company that has even 4 or 5 people per department, it should never be a problem. at my former employer (the first one mentioned in the original post), we had 5 or 6 support-focused team members, I rarely stepped outside of MSP support, beyond generating leads for inside sales to existing clients for stuff they needed from a technical aspect. at the “new” place, most deparments had fewer than 4 people. The team I was on, was three support techs.
What irked me, is that as MSP, I had to know everyone else’s job, but nobody was required to cross train on my team. All the other departments were solely focused on their specific tasks, but since I had to take total ownership of all the needs of the clients assigned to me, I had to know how the ISP operations and voice operations team’s jobs entirely. That was problematic for me. I raised the issue a few times and did not get positive responses. I persisted in succeeding at the role regardless, but I still didn’t like it. If I got a support ticket that was for an add/change/remove for a VoIP extension, I should have been permitted to forward that to the voice team and continue with my normal work, doing little more than traffic control on the ticket as a result; if a company wanted faster/different internet, or had an internet related issue, I should have been able to do the same for the ISP team, but it was expected that I would make my best effort to find and solve the problem before I engaged with that team, so I still had to know their job.
The irony of the whole thing is that the other departments jobs were so straight-forward that I was often able to do their jobs better than they could. I’m not meaning to brag or anything that I’m better or something, I don’t believe I am. With my specific disability, I’m classified as neurodivergent, so there’s a certain structure I always look for when dealing with issues. Simply having that structure seemed to lead me to better solutions than that team otherwise would have. The neurotypical workers in those teams would focus on just completing the immediate task, while I would go through the whole thing from top to bottom, trying to understand the full scope of the issue, from a fundamental level. This often led to me catching issues that were otherwise unnoticed. It also resulted in me taking much longer to do simple tasks than others took; which is a big reason I don’t consider my approach to be “better”, just different. It could be argued either way which is “better”, and such an assessment is really a matter of opinion. The fact is, me doing their work often resulted in finding more issues, and taking longer. I got blamed for slow working, and they shot the messenger more than once for the problems found; so I get blamed for things a lot. I’m okay with it because I know it’s not my fault. As long as nobody yells at me, or threatens my job for what I’ve found, I’m going to keep doing it… but my interest in doing that work was to resolve the problems so I don’t need to deal with it again later; so I always try to do root cause analysis, or RCA. RCA is not a short process… sometimes it’s as simple as changing deborah to sally, or whatever, on a phone system, and resetting the voicemail password, then emailing that information off to the customer. Other times it’s that the user is assigned but to an offline or incorrect phone, or the phone is assigned as the wrong model in the system and it’s not picking up the changes because the configuration file is wrong for the phone type (or any number of other errors). Things happen.
Sorry for the mini-rant, I kinda got off topic there for a bit.