Your menial tasks

E Double U

I'm curious about how people handle tasks that they are required to do, but feel there is no added value.

There was an alert that my team used to receive daily and we had to advise another team of it. Since another team had to take action I recommended giving them access to the system that generates the alerts. They never did it so I just disabled the alert much to the CISO's amusement lol.

I don't care for performing tasks just because it has always been that way especially when it doesn't add anything to my skills. I always bring those things to management's attention and if no valuable feedback is given then I take whatever action I see fit.

What do you guys do when faced with this?

iBrokeIT

"complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining" about sums it.

It all comes down to communication.

I think you need to communicate the issue better to your CISO so you can understand each others reasoning behind your positions. If you are receiving a daily alert and only acting as the middle man why can't the process be automated some how?

Maybe explain that these types of alerts are generating noise which are distracting your attention from the real alerts that deserve your attention. Or maybe the CISO wants this detailed level of alerting for his reports to executive leadership and expects your position to sift through them. Again, communication should help clarify which philosophy is correct to follow here.

Another thing to consider is that if the little things at your job start getting on your nerves it might time for a change of scenery.

Danielm7

When I started at my current job there had been a long standing weekly meeting to report on some data that almost never changed. After a month or so of being asked to run it and seeing that only 3 out of the 14+ people that were invited actually showed up I started summarizing the data in a weekly email. Even the people that did show up just looked down and read on the internet the entire time, completely pointless.

Eventually no one read the email either, so I decided that I'd just send an email if there was an important change to the data. Now the people involved know that if I email about it, they need to look at it because something is new.

aderon

Telling our customers their BGP sessions with us are down. They either know or don't care. 9 times out of 10 they don't respond to our email and the other 1 out of 10 times they reply back with "Yes, we are doing a maintenance." -_-

I've probably sent out 600+ of these kind of emails at this point and none of them have ever had an issue they didn't know about lol.

I'm in the process of making a script to auto email when the issue occurs and auto email when the issue resolves.

E Double U

iBrokeIT wrote: »

"complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining" about sums it.

It all comes down to communication.

I think you need to communicate the issue better to your CISO so you can understand each others reasoning behind your positions. If you are receiving a daily alert and only acting as the middle man why can't the process be automated some how?

Maybe explain that these types of alerts are generating noise which are distracting your attention from the real alerts that deserve your attention. Or maybe the CISO wants this detailed level of alerting for his reports to executive leadership and expects your position to sift through them. Again, communication should help clarify which philosophy is correct to follow here.
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Agreed 100%. I'm a one and done kind of fellow so I make things go away before we get anywhere close to the whining stage lol.

We actually had a conference call with the vendor about automation, but the CISO never made a decision. So I made one.

UnixGuy

Unfortunately everything at my current can be described as a 'menial task'.