Ask HN: Do you refuse to do stupid assignments?
I'm a systems engineer, back in a few weeks ago there was a wifi outage in several meet rooms. The incident has affected a few C ranking officers' access to the internet. The company president went outrage and CTO offered my manager to set up a few android pads to monitor the WiFi connection.
I told the manager that it's stupid thing todo and why in detail, anyway, he could not say no to the CTO. We eventually bought 10+ Android pads and placed them around the workspace. He setup a simple automation flow to log WLAN connection and disconnection events to a txt file, and each week we will have to manually fetch the file and put it into an Xls file.
Situation:
It's my shift this week. Should I say no to this kind os BS? Or should be quitting the job, this happens inclines that a lot of things that have gone wrong already.
Could you just automate this bit? Please your boss and remove the manual task from your duties?
Imho: The requirement to alert when WIFI is down is not stupid.
Based on OP's description, it sounds like that alert will be up to a week late, because the connectivity data is aggregated manually.
I mean...end user complaints is the cheapest kind of monitoring solution but maybe its not politically acceptable?
You could totally do redundancy and failovers and stuff. And perhaps automate some of that. And monitoring is there to detect the "down" to trigger some of these?