Sometimes my job / company is stupid

[slakjaw]

I got a new project today I will be removing some Cisco equipment from a site. The project calls for me to send the equipment to scrap. I say hey, wait a minute we have some of this exact equipment running at ..... I email the engineer and ask if we should keep a few of these items and that I would drop them off at the other site to use as spares since I know there aren't any spares of this stuff

He sends me back an email saying no, he said the equipment is end of life and that I am mistaken if I think we have any in the network (I am there several times a week and trust me, its there) I just let it go because A. I am not an engineer and these guys don’t really want to hear from tech’s and B. its completely out of my control

No wonder the stock price is in the crapper. What a waste.

/rant

[aigel]

Let me play devil's advocate: Put yourself in the guy's shoes. Would you rather modernize your setup over time as stuff breaks or do you want to rebuild the system with used spares? There can be a lot of time wasted with unknown / used equipment, which also translates in to $. The credit the engineer may get for saving money on equipment may be used up very quickly if the stuff isn't rebuilt fast and reliable.

G

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by aigel

Let me play devil's advocate: Put yourself in the guy's shoes. Would you rather modernize your setup over time as stuff breaks or do you want to rebuild the system with used spares? There can be a lot of time wasted with unknown / used equipment, which also translates in to $. The credit the engineer may get for saving money on equipment may be used up very quickly if the stuff isn't rebuilt fast and reliable.

G

Agreed. And you are assuming he will even get the credit. I've postponed and made due in the past to save the co's coin only to be rewarded with the company not having funds available to purchase equipment when it's really needed. You learn that lesson pretty quick.

Also consider the cost to a business in lost productivity when systems go down. It's cheap insurance to pay up front for mission critical infrastructure.

So Ed, todays network outage cost us $xx,xxxx. What happened?

Well I used old equipment to save us some money.

I see, and what would the new equipment have cost us?

The answer better be 2x's $xx,xxx or Ed is in deep s**t

[mikester]

Hey? What's the old stuff? I might be interested in some of it for my Lab if it is what I need.

Also - being one of those irritating engineers (I know I irritate the techs I work with at times) - using old gear is fine - having old gear on hand is absolutely a must - especially if you have old gear in production still. The idea however is not to have too much - just enough to get by in a real emergency.

Our company likes to 'sweat the assets' - we're typically at least a 5 year refresh cycle. Sometimes more if we can get away with it. This is fine so long as the gear is reliable and Cisco stuff is typically - code may be a little buggy but the hardware is usually reliable. SOME 'end of sale' stuff has actually just reached its 'non-buggy' maturity. In otherwords the code is now stable but the hardware's been replaced. They may have put it in an 'end of sale' status but support is usually still for 3 years or so - PIX firewalls have been end of sale for some time but some of the higher end models I think may still be supported (515s, 525s and 535s).

Again - I may be interested in the stuff if it is reasonable and what I need for my lab - I'm studying for my CCIE (scheduled August 26th) and while I have a lab at work - if I can get some gear at home I like that too.

[ruf-porsche]

Come on cut him some slack, he's from the old school were nothing is thrown out. Haven't we heard about recycling?

I would just follow what the "BOSS" want done because rule no. 1 the BOSS is always right, rule no.2 if the BOSS is wrong, see rule no.1.

LOL

[Bill Douglas]

In my past life as a tech I had alot of spares. Usually equipment fails at about 10:00 on a Sunday night and with spares you swap in a new power supply or whatever, and the client doesn't have any downtime.

Even if you have a good service level agreement with your hardware supplier you still have to configure the new box and connections are often different.

[slakjaw]

I get along with most of the engineers I work with there are a couple though that no one gets along with. I don't get annoyed by any of them. Occasional frustration maybe.... We are replacing the old stuff as quickly as possible. My concern was that we have this specific equipment in production at a site and there are no spares. That means they would have to put a card on a plane if something decided to fail, customer downtime et al.

The equipment has been there running for years with no problems maybe I am just being paranoid.

[Oracle]

Yep companies are like that.. I see 50K servers thrown out cause they're two or three years old. They're used as a trade in for 3k-5K for another 50K server.. nice deal for Sun eh?

[emcon5]

Originally Posted by slakjaw

He sends me back an email saying no, he said the equipment is end of life and that I am mistaken if I think we have any in the network (I am there several times a week and trust me, its there)

That is why I like having a camera phone.

"You sure about that there scooter?"

[rnln]

the guy is loosing his chance on getting new equiptments in the future because of you

[Gogar]

Sounds a lot like the "Cash for Clunkers" plan to me.