What is the work day of an IT engineer, if you are a girl

Hello!
My name is Vika, and I work as a service IT engineer at CROC, doing telephony and critical call-center solutions.


Sometimes thin fingers are a plus.


')
Now it's summer, so I sometimes get to the office from the subway on a longboard. True, while only learning.

When your friends find out who I am and what I am doing, a lot of questions immediately arise from “how does a large company work there?” And ending with “how do you carry a server?”. I will try to answer below.

Entrance to the office. One can see the edge of a special minibus, on which the rest go from the metro. I use it too often.



Pass the guard. You can get to the office either by RFID card or by scanning the face. My face is in the database, but I go with the map - it will still need it to pass to the iron warehouse in a couple of minutes:



Here is my workplace (I have already connected the laptop that I brought with me). The inflatable ball is that the back was straight. The chair is near - for those who sometimes sit with me:



Came to the server for Perm. It is heavy, so I asked colleague Sergey to pull him out of the box. While he will be in our department, then I will prepare him and send him to Perm. Perhaps I will go to accompany the installation myself, but for the time being it is not clear.



Here are my colleagues involved in monitoring and supporting customer systems. If something happened somewhere, the request is accepted and forwarded to the specific service engineer of the specific customer, in some cases it is me. The request comes regardless of the time of day and needs to be repaired within the time specified in the SLA. The piece of iron does not apply to them, this line card is for the switch, soon colleagues will carry it to test for good health.



Yes! Incidentally, I am far from being the only girl engineer, but still, I must admit, for example, among the field emergency engineers in the department of computer systems almost all guys.

Around are boxes and various small iron, which is almost always needed:



Here you can see one of the test phones - we have them in the office directly, in order to test the work of the IP telephony station, check the hardware for call centers and the functionality of the phones themselves.



And below - iron, which my colleague will carry on installation.





Next to my workplace:



Here is the room of our group of technical support for telephony and call centers. Server unpacked, colleagues went for lunch.



But the engineer should always remain in the room, to whom the call from the customer can be distributed. I'm on duty now.

Technical support call receiving system

There are no cups for storing small items, unlike the guys who are service engineers for ICE from a neighboring department. But we have a collection of clay dwarf figurines. We also agreed with colleagues to bring postcards from travels and lay them along the wall. We want to fill the entire perimeter.

Food and household items at work

We have a dining room, where in addition to lunch there is still breakfast and dinner. Dinner is served at the end of the working day and until 10 in the evening, for those who work at night, it can be breakfast, for the rest it is convenient if you do not want to cook at home. I also try on his hands sometimes.



This is not the husband calling home, but the notification system works for the call center operators I'm working on. Also test.

Here is my breakfast:



Here is the dining room during lunch:





We live on the 9th floor, and as on all floors without special access zones (we have a data center in the building and several platforms for testing solutions from major manufacturers, plus iron warehouses), there is a kitchen at the end of the corridor.



View from our doors:



Coffee in the kitchen. These white cups are just a sea, and they are washed by a dishwasher. Very comfortably:



Under the table I have different shoes (for all occasions - Friday, for meetings and trips, for walking around the office):



Downstairs there is a gym and shower. And there, and there I am a frequent visitor. Especially convenient to run into the shower in the morning, after a ride on the board.

Job

The laptop should be carried almost always. We serve dozens of call centers throughout the country for hardware and software. Including banking CC. Emergencies sometimes happen, and the laptop helps a lot. There is configured a reliable VPN-tunnel to directly control consoles. The main OS is Windows, but most of the work is done on virtual machines in our data center, or on servers across the country.

Every day we work with business-critical systems and equipment. Calm days happen, but not often. The workflow consists in testing new or faulty hardware, administering the software of customers, analyzing logs and detecting faults, communicating with vendors. Sometimes there are emergency situations, you need to respond quickly, sometimes to prepare equipment for replacement, for example, as with a server today. Often there is a work with documents for all this. Then the same prepared iron sometimes has to be mounted. When calmer days happen, you can read some educational literature, for example.

Our service department provides support for a very large range of traditional telephony systems and call center solutions. Among them are the call distribution system, the support system for automated workplaces of operators, the interactive speech interaction system, the recording system, the human resources management system of the CC. Of course, for each system we have dedicated specialists who are most competent in a particular area, but all the engineers are somehow familiar with all the products.

Plus, another unit deals with the infrastructure itself, data networks. Most of our colleagues have vast experience, there are those who have only been working in this field for 15 years, and we have been working in KROK for 15 years.

When I visit customers' sites, it is impossible to shoot there for obvious reasons. Therefore, I do not publish photos from external sites. But in general, I can say that there are well-equipped server rooms, and it happens that sometimes we have to remove a centimeter layer of dust from our hardware.

Here is our test booth at the workshop. On it, we check the hardware, test everything, run in new configurations, learn new ones. In the photo I am preparing a media resource board, without which ip telephony will not work for one major customer. This fee is worth as a good car, so it is better to check before the installation.







And this is my colleague and I turned in a cafe on the road:



And finally, here's what I'll take to leave for the customer:



Book - read on the road. Phone, screwdriver, external HDD, keys to the apartment, RFID-pass to the office and warehouse, cosmetic bag (there is another small screwdriver), a laptop, today is another piece of paper documentation for the equipment and a lot of different things. A handbag with a laptop is a weighty one.